About Ruby

A bit of his history

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Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto

He is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language.

As of 2011, Matsumoto is the Chief Architect of Ruby at Heroku, an online cloud platform in San Francisco.

Ruby

Matsumoto released the first version of the Ruby programming language on 21 December 1995.[5][6] He still leads the development of the language's reference implementation, MRI (for Matz's Ruby Interpreter).

MRuby

On April 2012, Matsumoto open-sourced his work on a new implementation of Ruby called mruby.[7][8] It is a minimal implementation based on his virtual machine, called ritevm, and is designed to allow software developers to embed Ruby in other programs while keeping memory footprint small and performance optimised.

Why Learn Ruby?

Many Ruby developers find it fun to work with Ruby, and fun is a great motivator when learning to code.

Ruby is a very high level language, which means Ruby abstracts away (i.e. handles for you) most of the complex details of the machine.

Thus, you can quickly build something from scratch with less lines of code.

How Ruby has achieved fame?

Ruby was made popular by the Ruby on Rails framework, a full-stack web framework that makes prototyping a breeze.

In this way, making it a web framework of choice for many startups and coding beginners alike.

Why Ruby is a beginner friendliness?

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Easy to Get Started With

Ruby was originally designed with the goal of making programming fun, and in Japan, where it came from, Ruby was used to make games. Ruby is succinct and reads like English, which makes the code easy to understand for coding beginners.

Since you'll be able to build prototypes quickly with Ruby on Rails, many find coding in Ruby a satisfying experience.

Flexible

As a dynamically typed language, Ruby does not have hard rules on how to build features, and it is very close to spoken languages. You'll have more flexibility solving problems using different methods. Furthermore, Ruby is also more forgiving of errors, so you'll still be able to compile and run your program until you hit the problematic part.

The scability of Ruby

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Not Easy to Maintain

Because Ruby is a dynamically typed language, the same thing can easily mean something different depending on the context. As a Ruby app grows larger and more complex, this may get difficult to maintain as errors will become difficult to track down and fix, so it will take experience and insight to know how to design your code or write unit tests to ease maintainability. However, you can learn how to design code better by working with an experienced Ruby mentor.

Slow

As a dynamically typed language, Ruby is slow because it is too flexible and the machine would need to do a lot of referencing to make sure what the definition of something is, and this slows Ruby performance down. Rails is in general more resource-hungry as well.

At any rate, there are alternatives such as JRuby, which is a faster implementation of Ruby. While this is probably still not as fast as Java, for example, it's still a vast improvement.

Community

First of all, community size is important, because the larger a programming language community is, the more support you'd be likely to get.

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As you step into the programming world, you'll soon understand how vital support is, as the developer community is all about giving and receiving help. Moreover, the larger a community, the more people will be building useful tools to make development in that particular language easier. As of now, there are over 600 notable programming languages world-wide.

So, with that context in mind, let's get into the details of the Ruby community size.

8th Largest StackOverflow Community

StackOverflow is a programming Q&A site you will no doubt become intimate with as a coding beginner. In terms of programming languages, Ruby has over 27k followers, making it the 9th most followed language. Ruby in general is a community that is quite welcoming to beginners, and out of popular languages Ruby questions are the 2nd most likely to be answered.

5th Largest Meetup Community

At meetups, you can generally network and learn from fellow developers. Meetups often offer mentorship to those who want it as well. There are over 840 Ruby groups at Meetup.com, totaling over 430k members worldwide.

3rd most tagged language at GitHub

Generally, the more useful projects there are, the more likely someone has already built a function you need and built it well, which will greatly speed up your development process. Ruby on Rails is known to have many nice gems and tools that helps with development, and there are over 970 Ruby projects on GitHub that have over 500 stars.

Future of Ruby

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With the rise of Node.js, Ruby on Rails' popularity has diminished somewhat, but thanks to the ease of prototyping with Ruby on Rails, tech startups continue to love Ruby on Rails.

Ruby is the 10th most popular language on the TIOBE index

As an open source project, Rails is actively worked on with a relatively fast update cycle, and Ruby on Rails 5 beta version was just recently released on December 18th, thus Ruby's ability to stay technically relevant is still strong.