The Great Ruby, Not Another Scripting Language

Armed with some experiences in dynamic programming language from Lisp, Perl, to (L/U)nix shell scripting languages, to high-level compiled languages like C, C#, and C++ to intermediate language like Java, I could not help asking "what the heck is Ruby?" when the world rumbles the word R-u-b-y.  


With that curiosity lingering in mind, you figure out what I would do next?  Yes, I google-d and I amazon-ed for anything Ruby and sure enough, within 2 hours, The Ruby is sitting quietly in my lap waiting for me to explore.


Then after 30 minutes playing with irb managing to print out the great shameful "Hello World" example, I paused.  What the h***?  What is new that I didn't see before?  Yes, Ruby is a objected oriented language much like Python/Java that I could instantiate an object with Object.new; Yes, like Lisp  that supports lambda or block, I could surely define a block dynamically; and sure, Ruby syntax looks like the best mix of all languages I know; and yet, to Ruby's credit, I no longer have to deal with the hateful Perl's syntax.  


That's very nice but that still does not convince me anything?  Did I miss anything here?  It must be just those investors who have so much Franklin bills to throw around to invest into these "marketing-hyped" IT.  But before I hung up on that thought and would trash my ThinkPad T61 laptop with anger, I took a timeout, a practice I learned at work and so thanks to the "Anger Management" course, I took a glass of 500-ml fresh water, munging a full fresh apple and with that much vitamins, I smartly google-d for the biography of Ruby-inventor Matz and his own introduction of the language, then hit the highly-reviewed Ruby Metaprogramming book.  Soon enough, I meant, until the next night (I really meant "night" after my kids went to bed), I then started to realize that Ruby is surely a better language in many ways but what makes it powerful language is the ecosystem built around it; among which Rails, the web application framework, deserves most of the credit.  


In the incoming articles, I hope I will shed some lights on key benefits of Ruby that makes it so popular and de-facto standard language for new web-based software applications.  So, don't be surprised if you're looking for a job and recruiters keep asking for Ruby and RoR experiences.  In which case, I would highly recommend that you get into it and whether you will get a Ruby job or not, your time will be worth it.