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Comment by Argorak | Hacker News Reader

The story that Big Business is not using Ruby is just that - a story. On the first RailsConf i've been to (RailsConf Europe 2007), most attendees were actually working for Big Biz.

I have spent most of my ruby career in large companies, even for Padrino work. No one builds a multi-million dollar project in Ruby. But one or the other frontend for that. Some of the services. The deployment tooling, be it Chef or Puppet. Ruby is a surprisingly flexible language and can be successfully used on or off the JVM, which large companies just _like_.

This blog post reeks of negativity and speaks of a willingness to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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> On the first RailsConf i've been to (RailsConf Europe 2007), most attendees were actually working for Big Biz.

Selection bias.

Go to a COBOL conference and you'll likely find that most attendees work in Big Biz as well. What does that tell you?

Indeed. Who's more likely to afford several hundreds of dollars for a ticket, plus travel, plus days of hotel, plus lose several days of productivity? A bootstrapped startup, an independent developer, or a corporation with departments that have seven-figure budgets?

That is certainly one factor. But companies are also selective and rarely send someone on conferences for a language that doesn't interest them _at all_.

On top of that, the initial statement was "almost no big business uses Ruby".

That COBOL is predominantly used in Big Biz? I think you proved his point.

It'd be selection bias if he made the assumption that most big businesses were using Ruby. That's not the point he was making -- what he said was that lots of people using Ruby work at big businesses.

> That COBOL is predominantly used in Big Biz? I think you proved his point.

No, you don't understand what selection bias means.

As much as you didn't understand the point that I was trying to disprove, which was the bare assumption that big business is uninterested in Ruby.

You're not very good at explaining it either. Plus, selection bias may not be the only sampling effect here.

Selection bias is when a developer from Big Biz is more likely to go to conferences than a developer from smaller business. Do you have any specific reason to believe that? Not knowing much about conferences, I don't. So until you tell me of those specific reasons, I have no reason to believe in selection bias.

Now, there's another sampling effect: maybe Big Biz simply hire (much) more developers than smaller businesses. If 5% of Big Biz devs work on Ruby, and 10% of startup devs work on Ruby, but 90% percent of developers work for Big Biz, then your Ruby conference will still be 80% full of Big Biz devs without selection bias, even though Big Biz is twice as hostile to Ruby.

> Do you have any specific reason to believe that?

They have more money so they can send more developers to these conferences than startups. Also, they have more employees, so the odds of a number of them being Rails developers is higher.

But that's not even what was being discussed in the context of my "selection bias" remark: the OP was saying that Ruby is used in BigBiz and used Ruby conference attendance to support this claim, which is different from what you are arguing.

I work in a large corporation. We use Microsoft .NET (recently converted from Java). At home, I develop with Ruby for smaller pet projects and personal things.

I would attend a Ruby/Rails conference, and I work for a "big business". That doesn't mean that my "big business" uses Ruby.

Are you 100% sure that no department has ever used or commissioned software that runs Ruby? My experience is that most companies have and still do.

Be aware that this includes deployment automation for some software. Two of the behemoths in that space are written in Ruby.

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