Ruby, Ruby

When I saw the headline about boycotting Ruby, I thought "What now!?" What's wrong with Ruby? It's a great lightweight, open source, dynamic language that's easy to use and is gaining a worldwide following. Ruby was the #1 topic that programmers attending the Dr. Dobb's/CSDN Software Development 2.0 conference in China wanted to hear more about, and Ruby expert Nick Plante is traveling to Beijing with us to talk about just that. So what's the big deal with boycotting it?

Well, as you've probably come to expect with me, I goofed and mis-read the headline. What it actually said was Boycott of Rubies from Troubled Myanmar Could be Difficult, which is a gem of a different color. Whew! And luckily the story has nothing to do with software development in general, and the Ruby programming language in particular.

But there's no question that Ruby has really taken off since Dr. Dobb's published Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt's article Programming in Ruby several years ago. It's old news by now, but nonetheless interesting that Tim O'Reilly reported Ruby books outsell Python books.

Among the more recent Ruby news is the first community release of Ruby.NET, a compiler that translates Ruby source code into .NET intermediate code. Nice.

Ruby is also making its way into the business of software development, as tool vendors are starting to crank out Ruby-based tools. CodeGear, for instance, recently announced CodeGear 3rdRail, an IDE for Ruby on Rails.

According to David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, CodeGear has "gone beyond macros and generators and dealt with Rails code on a logical rather than merely textual level. This opens up a whole new world for things like advanced refactorings and, in general, provides an environment that's familiar to anyone coming from IDE-heavy environments like .NET or J2EE."

I guess dealing with stuff like newspaper headlines on a logical, rather than textual, level is something I need to do more of. That way, I wouldn't get the news on gems confused with gems of programming languages.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:12 AM  Permalink