Some compelling (to me, at least) articles/etc. on the excellence of Ruby:

  • Martin Fower says people he works with are significantly more productive in Ruby.
  • Tim Bray says: “Ruby is remarkably, perhaps irresistibly, attractive. Over the last week I’ve got an unreasonable amount of work done in a ridiculously short period of time, with lots of interruptions, in a language I previously didn’t know.”
  • A remarkable interview with David Heinemeier Hanson. His first program in Ruby was Basecamp, the programming part of which took a grand total of two and a half programmer-months.

And it’s not just productivity: just listen to DHH talk about the sheer enjoyment of programming in Ruby; he’s clearly not the only person who feels that way.

I won’t claim that everything is perfect in Ruby land – Sam Ruby complains about the libraries, for example. (Incidentally, I saw a similar complaint about C++ recently, and it’s really true. When I started learning the language, I saw the glorious example that is the STL, and there are other nice examples out there (e.g. the Boost smart pointers), but there’s a lot of disorganization out there, and a lot of libraries that just aren’t good examples of how to use the language. Where the latter issue is, of course, compounded by the wealth of paradigms that the language supports.) That, however, I can deal with, in the face of an apparently excellent language and one dominating library example.

Post Revisions:

There are no revisions for this post.