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Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular?

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Re: Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular?

#41

Post by websitescenes »

xkcdfanboy wrote: post #6
adrianlmm wrote: post #2

I personally love the syntax, and in my own experience is not that slow, I use it with Sinatra and my productivity is huge. I'm also a C# and Delphi developer. I learned Ruby cause I had the need the learn an scripting language, and the reason to not learn python was that it looks like it is stock for ever in the 2.7 version, so I chose Ruby and I'm very pleased with my decision.

It's interesting that the two responses on here (yours included) so far mention that it was learned for scripting. The main reason I made the initial post is because I see it being used for much more than just scripting, ie. rails and ruby motion. It seems somewhat naive to use a scripting language in leui of a real language when coding something industrial. So I still am at a loss... Thank you for your comment, yeah…

You can make iPhone apps with anything you want. You can even use plain html5 and js. There are many, many options to utilize your preferred language in app development. It's definitely not just Ruby.

Re: Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular?

#42

Post by Mithaldu »

lsiebert wrote: post #38
tudorconstantin wrote: post #21

I am a perl dev for almost 3 years and i learned it at my job after i tried ruby and python. For more than a year i felt i should have chosen ruby because of how intuitive it feels: you read the code always from left to right, whereas in perl you often either go from right to left or from the center of the line outward. Besides that, fuby also has that principle of less surprise. However, after I got accustomed with…

I know perl (among others) which I really like, but I feel like I have to learn python or ruby to be competitive.

That's only a feeling.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...

Re: Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular?

#43

Post by Mithaldu »

csense wrote: post #29
chc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. What does Rails do that Django doesn't? The answer is, basically, "Have a larger ecosystem without being Java." There are a few things each has by default that the other doesn't, but by and large I don't think people pick Rails because it has 8 million features and Django only has 7.95 million. > 2. Why hasn't the Python community seen whatever Ruby's doing and copied whatever makes Ruby popular? Are there any P…

> Python took a relatively long time to put out a comparable product. I don't remember if Django existed, but there certainly wasn't the situation you have today where Django is basically the "Python Rails" and they're seen as being on roughly equal footing. Instead, Pythonistas were all talking about how you should take Twisted and twelve other libraries and you just write all this glue code and then it's sort of li…

> very few people still code in Perl these days

Please try to separate your beliefs from facts.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...

Re: Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular?

#44

Post by lsiebert »

Mithaldu wrote: post #42
lsiebert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know perl (among others) which I really like, but I feel like I have to learn python or ruby to be competitive.

That's only a feeling. http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...

Maybe so, but the who's hiring page from May has zero mentions of perl, and quite a few of python and ruby. If there is a good internship for a perl hacker in the Bay Area, I haven't seen it.

I got to meet Larry Wall, (was nice enough to come and talk to my class) and even he seems to have had trouble finding work during his career.

Actually, from your comment history, you seem like a perl aficionado. Maybe you could email me and let me know where I should be looking. I'd email you, but you have no contact info supplied.

Re: Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular?

#45

Post by spoiler »

read wrote: post #19
spoiler wrote: post #9

I love Ruby's syntax. I tries Python, but I didn't like it as much as Ruby, what putt me off about python is the meaningful indentation (although I do not mind that in CoffeeScript). Also, Ruby itself is not slow, but CRuby (MRI, YARV, whatever you call it) is slow; Rubinius ("rbx") is a wonderful (and my personal favourite) alternative for MRI. In fact, I use rbx and EventMachine for a fun app that has a growing num…

Can you elaborate on what put you off Python's indentation?

When reading Python at anything over 3 levels of indentation I had to use a ruler to know what level I am currently in. Or similar, when there was multiple lines between two blocks or commands This was before I started using sublime text and I was very new to programming, also never tried Python in ST, to be fair! I mostly missed that visual cue where the block ends, I suppose.

Re: Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular?

#46

Post by dylangs1030 »

Skoofoo wrote: post #17

"I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language." -Matz Ruby and its ecosystem revolves around your happiness and productivity. Isn't that great?

I think most languages set out to achieve this. It's not a real answer.

For the record, Ruby is a great language, but a better argument for it would be syntactical analysis or talking about features.

If Guido had this awesome quote about his goals for Python, it wouldn't make Python a cool language automatically.

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