I'd have to say yes, once I got comfortable with good Ruby practices I found it was as easy if not easier to keep the code clean as projects mature.
Some of the code-browsing and refactoring tools aren't as smooth, but they're also not as necessary.
I suspect you're dealing with concurrency issues? In that case, yes the JVM is brilliant at that and JRuby might be a great option for you. Ruby concurrency is coming along though. 1.9 is no longer green threads, and Rubinius has gotten rid of the GIL altogether.
Most of the issues I've run into are environment related. I can make 1.9.2 segfault with ease, but there's mounting pressure against supporting REE. Libraries seem to rarely support backwards-compatibility, so I spend an inordinate amount of time backporting fixes or trying to upgrade a large dependency graph. And as you noted, concurrency is problematic.
So, when looking at productivity, I'm not necessarily looking at the language itself, but the entire environment I need to work in. I may just be doing something grossly wrong, which is why I inquired.
If it helps frame things at all, my primary project is coming up on 2 years old and started as a Rails 2.3 app that recently had a very painful upgrade to 3.1 (took on the order of 75 hours). And I had a couple years experience prior to that doing Ruby & Rails stuff.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, config issues can be painful in many environments, and Rails has its own brand of frustrations, particularly when upgrades are concerned.
This is just a shot in the dark, but if you're on REE/Passenger and getting thread/segfault issues, you might try Apache's Passenger config with the conservative spawn method. I've had similar issues in the past resolved by simply not using REE's shared memory.
Thanks. I had to do that recently because of issues with the prepared statement pool in 3.1 + Passenger. But I can segfault in 1.9.2 just by loading a console or running tests. It doesn't instill a grand sense of stability.
Thanks for the feedback though. I find it helpful to do periodic sanity checks.
Some of the code-browsing and refactoring tools aren't as smooth, but they're also not as necessary.
I suspect you're dealing with concurrency issues? In that case, yes the JVM is brilliant at that and JRuby might be a great option for you. Ruby concurrency is coming along though. 1.9 is no longer green threads, and Rubinius has gotten rid of the GIL altogether.