In this presentation from QCon, Martin Fowler shares the experience of ThoughtWorks with Ruby. There is a transcript of the presentation, here.
For three years ThoughtWorks worked on 41 projects with Ruby (and Rails, primarily). Including one product of their own, Мingle.
For me personally, the main points are:
- With Ruby and Rails the programmers are more productive and they like working with it.
- From the performance perspective, Ruby and Rails are slow, compared to other similar frameworks. Just look at the hardware requirements for Mingle for 40-50 users!
- Ruby is not a mature technology. It lack developer instruments, for example. And I wouldn’t believe they are not needed.