Ruby vs. Java myths: project size

Without having any experience on large teams working in Java vs. Ruby (or their generic counterparts), I'd like to see some data. My first impression is that Java would be better suited to projects with larger teams, but what is at play there?

If you have a large team size, is the reason Java is a better choice because you have "average" developers or are able to find more people more comfortable in that environment than a Ruby environment? If you had 25 good Ruby developers (who were also good Java developers) would it be a disaster to use Ruby for the project over Java?

I'd be interested to see if anyone had done valid research on this, but intuitively I'd probably side with you (I've yet to read the link you provided though, so perhaps I should have done so before posting this).

@Sam, I think it would be hard to do good comparative research, but you're right - it would be interesting to find out info like largest team size on a successful Ruby project - even just a case study from a project with 25 or 50 Ruby developers (if such a thing exists) would be cool.

Of course, the fact is that with 25 good programmers following agreed conventions, you can work in any language. The challenge with Ruby for me is that if you start using in-language metaprogramming and then don't document exactly what you're doing it could become very messy very quickly. In Java it is a little harder to b"blow your leg off" like that.

@Pan69, I think you can actually compare Java and Ruby as I think the IDE support and static typing alone bring benefits for larger projects. However it is also a good point that J2EE has more than just Java going for it, although I'm not sure how much of that you can take advantage of with JRuby which might narrow that gap . . .

Stuart - Awesome. Do you know if papers or summaries will be made available (perhaps even recordings of the presentations, even at a price)? I'm certainly open (in fact hopeful) to the idea, so anything I can get my hands on would be great.

Sammy: I don't know what erubycon's plans are for distributing materials, but I will let the organizers know of you interest. Peter: A lot of Rails conferences do more pure Ruby than you would think. Rails is great, but it doesn't take long to appreciate the secret sauce. Conference organizers need the Rails name for marketing, but more people like you asking for Ruby by name will help change that. :-)