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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

My impression of the Ruby community, especially the OSS part of it, was that they were explicitly more about tinkering than enterprise. Certainly characters like _why were in that camp.

In regards to monkey-patching, while I'm not a Ruby programmer by any means, I sorely feel its absence in other languages. It's in JavaScript (expando objects as well as being able to override and overwrite built-in methods of existing types), and to some extent available in C# (extension methods are a sort-of expando object, but there is very little ability to overwrite a method). Like operator overloading, sure, don't build a project completely off of it (I'm looking at you, C++'s iostream), but when you need it, damn you need it. I'm still delving into Python (late to the party, whatever), but I definitely use Python in much more of a tinkering fashion, so monkey-patching is something I would desire in the language.

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My impression of the Ruby community, especially the OSS part of it, was that they were explicitly more about tinkering than enterprise. Certainly characters like _why were in that camp.

I don't entirely disagree with the larger sentiments, but I worry about the tone of the word 'tinker'. That is, the Ruby world is full of playful characters, and often displays a spirit that is far from corporate. However, many Ruby (and RoR) apps are also serious businesses at this point. There are also many libraries that don't charge money, do exhibit that playful or exuberant spirit, but also provide hard-core real-world functionality (e.g., Nokogiri).

tl;dr The word 'tinker' is a bit trivializing (perhaps unintentionally on Martelli's part). The division between 'tinker' and 'enterprise' doesn't fully or properly cut up the problem space. It's a binary view of a multi-faceted world.

(For whatever it's worth, this is my view as someone on the outside of this whole situation. I use Ruby and Perl about equally, primarily for systems administration and personal projects.)

I agree completely. I tend to dislike the phrase "enterprise development" anyway, because it implies that somehow our programming is suddenly different just because a company uses it. But, I try to write for my audience.

Eh. Most of my work (not all) is done within the confines of a company. There are some dramatically different ideas when you're writing something to be used WITHIN a company than when you're writing something to be used BY a company.

Most of it makes sense, or seems obvious, but your SAAS companies don't typically offer Active Directory (or LDAP) integration, as most companies aren't willing to expose their directories outside of their firewalls.

Auditing levels tend to be more paranoid, and need to be structured so that they can be fed into (or are at least sane enough to be read by) the industry-standard log analysis tools.

Admin accounts are typically transitioned to in-house users, or employees of the company, instead of being managed by the man behind the curtain (you).

So, perhaps it's that my experience is different than the majority of HN here, but to me, 'enterprise development' is a dramatically different process than what those guys at 37Signals do, for example.

C# (by .NET 4) now has real expando objects, if you really need them. It uses what they call the Dynamic Language Runtime: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.dynamic.expan...

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