Andy Hunt (from Pragmatic Programmers) on Why Ruby?
From Andy’s Blog: Andy Hunt, co-author of Programming Ruby says, “People keep writing me, or approaching me at conferences to ask if Ruby was really as special as we say. It really is. Okay, let me back up a second and explain how this all came about….But while you could do OO in Perl at that time, it was kind of painful. There was too much hand-waving and features that worked solely by coincidence. The idea was great, but the implementation was limiting….
So I thought I’d take a look at Python and other emerging languages in that space, but none of them really grabbed me. Python in particular was a dissapointment; it seemed to have all the features I wanted and good library support, but the language always felt kinda clunky…..
When people ask me what attracts me to Ruby, I have two answers:
First, more than any other language I’ve used, it stays out of your way. You don’t have to spend any effort “satisfying the compiler” as you would in C++, or even Java. These languages have an awful lot of noise and verbosity. You get used to it of course, but it’s pretty wearing over time.
Second, I can type in an absurd amount of code in Ruby and have it work the first time. Not 2-3 passes resolving any syntax issues, not 4-5 passes tracking down a bug or two. It just works. Ruby’s not perfect, by any means, it’s got dark corners to the language just like every other language. But it has a lot fewer of them. For the great majority of projects, the great majority of the time, it just works."
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