One evening in May, 2006 at a ThoughtWorks Sydney company meeting, Richard McLaren (then a Senior VP of ThoughtWorks) and I made a bet with Jon Tirsen (now Google überwunderkind) and Roy Singham (still Chairman of ThoughtWorks) about Ruby in the Enterprise.

The claim from Roy and Jon was that within five years, 10% of applications running in the Enterprise would be written in Ruby. Richard and I bet against that. The prize is a case each of the winners’ favourite potable.

I’ve since been steadily working to try to lose that bet, and now code daily in Ruby at Hashrocket.

Alas, with just one year to go, I think Richard and I are going to win. Although there’s been a decent growth in Ruby’s adoption in the Enterprise, my esteemed colleagues underestimated the lack of capability, talent, and intellect of the majority of corporate IT decision makers.