Ruby experts tell us why they are in love with Ruby/Rails. Recently, I attended a Ruby users group in Atlanta and I was very surprised to see over 50 people attending the usergroup on  a weekday evening, and nearly all of them have been active members of the usergroup for at least over a year. I could tell that they loved Ruby/Rails unlike anything I have seen in the the C++/Java community (languages I work with). The expert panel below will tell us why they are "in love" with Ruby/Rails.

Ruby Panel Experts

 

Satish Talim: Has over 29 years of IT experience and is a Ruby Mentor on rubyforge.org. Maintains rubylearning.com, a thorough collection of Ruby Study Notes for those who are new to the Ruby programming language and in search of a solid introduction to Ruby's concepts and constructs.

Peter Cooper: The author of of Beginning Ruby, he is a serial entrepreneur based in the north of England. He maintains Ruby Inside  to not only flex his creative muscles but also to provide the Ruby community with a human-edited digest of interesting Ruby news, tricks, and tips.

Alex Wayne: He has been Using Rails since before 1.0. He is the Author of FlexImage Rails plugin. Greatly enjoy pizza, beer and other yummy things. He is the Asst. Organizer of the North Bay Area Ruby Users Group.His Ruby site.

Alex Leverington: Developer of popular GPL'd IT support tool named SimpleTicket.

Abhay Kumar: He is a data junkie and software engineer, is an active member of the Ruby development community - has presented at Rails related events, has published a Ruby Gem and works professionally with Ruby. His Blog.

Adam Williams: 3 years of experience with Ruby and 6 years of experience with Java. He made the jump from Java to full time Rails and couldn't be happier.
His openSource work includes RDT, Open Sails, Radiant CMS, OFXRB , EaSSL.

Alex Kane: Alex Kane is a Software Developer who comes from a financial background and is currently consulting in New York and Tokyo. He now uses Rails to become more productive.  His Website.

Adam Keys: A software developer from Dallas, TX, he’s been working on a book about Web Services and Ruby that he hopes to finish before the galaxy collapses on itself. He also writes on his weblog, The Real Adam on topics ranging from captioned cats to Ruby and microformats.

Q: If you were to start afresh, would you learn Ruby again?

 

Satish Talim:  Definitely a *Yes* - for Ruby's simplicity, it's terse syntax, it's endless flexibility, the feeling that we can do whatever we want, whenever we need. For inexperienced programmers there's the plus side that the learning curve is very smooth. You can master the basics in a few days and grow alongside the language. In fact, Ruby can be a good entry-level language to learn and I am trying to convince the local educational authorities in Pune, India to make this a reality.

Peter Cooper:  Yes. I started by becoming interested in Rails first and then learnt Ruby by osmosis, but looking back it makes much more sense to learn Ruby first and Rails afterwards. Ruby is very powerful in its own right, not just as the supporting language for a Web framework.

Alex Wayne: Absolutely.

Alex Leverington: Absolutely.

Abhay Kumar: Yes.

Adam Williams: Absolutely. Though I will say I am thankful for my experiences with other languages.

Alex Kane: Absolutely.  I made the switch from Java to ruby about a year ago and haven't looked back (much).  Java is a great language but it's really verbose.  One Ruby is easier to implement is that there's simply less typing. I had lunch with Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz; the guy who created Ruby) in Tokyo and he's a really sharp guy.  It's his vision that's made Ruby so easy to work with.

Adam Keys: Definitely!  Even beyond the opportunities knowing Ruby has afforded me, Ruby and the people involved with it have changed the way I develop software in a profoundly positive way.  I could have learned  about metaprogramming, DSLs, aesthetic and scaling elsewhere, but I don't think I would have learned it as quickly or as well as I've been able to as part of the Ruby community.
 

Q: What do you think is the most important feature of the Ruby language?

Satish Talim: Wow, that's a very, very hard question to answer. However, what I think I love best about Ruby is described by Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) "Ruby's a language that makes me productive while being fun to use." Specifically, blocks are important in Ruby. I'm always surprised by how much I can do with a method that takes a block.

Peter Cooper: The freedom that Ruby provides is very important. It's a very consistent language with a well established syntax at the base level, but if you need to you can dive in and change significant parts of how Ruby works on the fly. This power, combined with how easily you can begin building simple programs, makes it a great all-rounder language.

Alex Wayne: It's dynamism.  Being able to add/remove methods, reflect on the state of objects, and use meta programming tricks is what makes ruby so powerful and fun.

Alex Leverington: Ruby has a very consistent OO methodology, syntax, and uses messaging (similar to smalltalk). This combined with the 'natural english' syntax makes code very easy to read while still being flexible enough to create complex programs.

Abhay Kumar:It is designed, from the beginning, to be object oriented and is purely so
(no wrapper classes like Java), it's dynamic, it has a great regular
expression engine (and will become even better very soon), it's intuitive
and legible (a non Ruby linguist can actually ready through source and at
least partially understand what's going on), and it has a lot of syntactic
sugar

Adam Williams: Blocks.

Alex Kane: That's a difficult question to answer.  I love the fact that Ruby code is usually easy to read. It also has many of the Object Oriented features of Java but it's a dynamic language which makes it more flexible sometimes. If I had to pick the most important standard library it would be Enumerable. Take a look at it, it's really powerful but at the same time easy to use. Check out the syntax for writing a loop, it's really easy:

[1,2,3,4,5].each {|i| puts "Number #{i}"}

Adam Keys: At a language level, Ruby would not be Ruby without blocks.  The way they change how you program is worth any price of admission on their own.  Zooming out, I again have to note that the people around Ruby are fantastic.

Q: What Ruby forums would you recommend?

Satish Talim: Obviously the *ruby-talk forum* . It's the most active forum and you would find most of the top Ruby experts helping each other and all the newbies out there. This forum is the fastest and easiest way to learn and share knowledge. The other is my own *RubyLearning forum*  for Ruby newbies. I am actively involved here, helping all the newbies with their Ruby-related problems, questions. It has a vibrant community.

Peter Cooper: Unfortunately Rubyists don't tend to congregate on forums very much. The most popular forum for discussions is the ruby-talk mailing list  although there's also RailsForum.com which is very popular for Rails and Ruby developers alike.

Alex Wayne: Ruby Forum

Alex Leverington: None, #ruby on freenode is best

Abhay Kumar: I wouldn't unless you count ruby-forum (which is really just the ruby-talk email list)

Adam Williams: None in particular. I tend to look for solutions when I approach unfamiliar problems, and stay connected to great folks who will tell me when something interesting is going on.

Alex Kane: I like Ruby Forum .  It houses a number of ruby forums with gateways to Google groups as well.

Adam Keys: If you have the means, I think the best thing to do is to show up to a Ruby or Rails conference, whether its local or national.  Establish a relationship with as many people as you can and maintain it.  Without a doubt this is the best resource for getting beyond what the books can tell you.

Q: What books would you recommend to a newbie?

Satish Talim:

•  If you have no previous programming skill, I suggest you read Chris Pine's 'Learn to Program' book first.
  
• You could then start off with my Ruby eBook.
  
• Next you can read through Peter Cooper's "Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional" book (Author: Peter Cooper himself is on our panel)
  
• Finally, read through David Black's "Ruby For Rails"  book.

Peter Cooper: If the newbie knows literally nothing about computation, algorithms or what programming even means, I'd recommend Chris Pine's "Learn to Program." It covers programming from the very first steps and uses Ruby to do it. If the newbie knows they want to use Ruby, understands at least what programming is, and perhaps has another language under his / her belt, I'd recommend my own book, "Beginning Ruby" published by Apress. I wrote the book to fill this giant hole in the market, as existing Ruby books tend to assume you know what object orientation is and so forth. In its 650 pages, Beginning Ruby takes you through everything you'd need to know about the language to feel confident to make your own way. If the newbie is really an extremely seasoned programmer who's already familiar with object orientation (possibly a Java or Python programmer) then The Ruby Way or the "Pickaxe" books are the best bet.

Alex Wayne: Pickaxe, then Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Edition

Alex Leverington: Latest edition of Pickaxe

Abhay Kumar: The Ruby Way (Hal Fulton); Pragmatic Ruby (Dave Thomas)

Adam Williams: Programming Ruby 2nd Edition.

Alex Kane: I got started with "Ruby for Rails" by David A. Black.  It covers Ruby pretty well while digging in to Rails.

Adam Keys: If your background is programming, the Pickaxe is the way to go.  I don't have any other books solely on the Ruby language, but I don't think you can go wrong there.If your background isn't in programming, go for The Poignant Guide.  If you're a programmer, it might aggravate you.

Q: Name a programming language that you would like to learn? (if you had the time & resources, of course)

Satish Talim: Lua  - a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language.

Peter Cooper: PHP, surprisingly. I find it extremely inconsistent and the syntax poor, but there's no denying how useful PHP is nowadays and how easy it is to throw together very small Web facing apps with it.

Alex Wayne: C++, Objective C

Alex Leverington: Lua

Abhay Kumar: Erlang (learning/using it now)

Adam Williams: Erlang. We are seeing the dawn of the concurrent world

Alex Kane: I'd like to learn Erlang.  It seems to have really cool process management, but I haven't had time to really get in to it yet.

Adam Keys: I would like to use Erlang on a real problem.  I'd also like to get a better understanding of Haskell and OCaml.  I can recognize them from a distance, but I don't yet _get it_ when it comes to those two languages.


I would like to thank the panel for sharing their thoughts with us. I am sure the answers will help everyone from a newbie with no programming experience to anyone who is looking to learn Ruby to extend their skills and, maybe, even the experienced Ruby hand can gain an insight or two.

You need to watch, Adam Keys's USS Ruby, a one act. Its Hilarious.

This is part of the "What Makes a Programming Language Popular" series where we compare Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. See

• Whats More Popular in the Corporate World
• Who Earns More
• How Many Developers Are There
• Support Resources Comparison
• Open Source Projects Comparison
• Book Sales to Predict Adoption & Retention
• Perl Jobs Python Jobs Ruby Jobs PHP Jobs 

 

 

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