David Williams, vice president of technology at Coupa, believes the Ruby on Rails is a good fit for enterprise software. In an interview with eWeek, he explained, “For us, the choice was mainly between Ruby on Rails and a couple of different frameworks written in Java. Rails’ principles of ‘convention over configuration’ and ‘don’t repeat yourself,’ combined with the ‘magic’ made possible by Ruby’s dynamism, meant that with Rails we could build more features faster with fewer developers and less code. Since our whole tech stack was open source, and there weren’t that many layers, if there was a problem that cropped up anywhere we could debug it quickly and fix it ourselves. We found that we were writing about one-tenth of the code that we’d need to write to do something similar in Java, and having less code to start with, meant that it was inherently easier to maintain.”
Williams said the language is versatile, elegant, concise, expressive and extendable, and he added, “When it surprises you, it tends to be for the better, meaning that as a developer you spend more time and energy on the problems you care about and less on catering to the language’s own needs.”
