Ask HN: What makes Ruby so great?

Spend a week learning it and see what you think. Play with the metaprogramming, runtime code creation, and dynamic method invocation, and see if it floats your boat.<p>(Try this article I wrote for DevX: <a href="http://www.devx.com/RubySpecialReport/Article/34502" rel="nofollow">http://www.devx.com/RubySpecialReport/Article/34502</a><p>I tried to give an example that would show off some of the nicer things in Ruby.)<p>After trying the language, if you don't like it, don't use it, and stop reading Ruby articles.<p>BTW, anything that claims "Blub is so awesome, you should use it," but doesn't explain why, isn't worth the time of day. Ignore them.<p>It's unfortunate that there are some people who gush over Ruby like it was their first high school crush, but so what? Try a variety of languages, find one or two that suit you, learn them well, and go make stuff.<p>Code talks, bullshit walks.

I'm with you on the Ruby fans seem like Apple fans.<p>Based on your comment about web programming, you are talking about Ruby on Rails which is the web framework for the Ruby language.<p>I've just gone back to learning RoR after trying it a few years ago. I'm normally a PHP programmer, but have been playing with some RoR with MongoDB stuff.<p>My take on it coming from a regular LAMP is that RoR has lots of gems (packages) that are easy to install and use.<p>The code generators get you up and running really quickly, though I'm not actually a fan of most generators.<p>RoR applications have a rather specific structure. I think it is deeper than MVC, as there are naming conventions for functions, variables/collections, etc.<p>The structure is good because it is fairly easy to back-trace through somebody else's code to see what they've done.<p>What I'm finding really challenging is that there are so many small details that are hidden from the code.<p>For instance, in RoR, 'render' is like an include file, but you don't actually have to type the name of the file or where it exists. Based on the naming schemes and structure of RoR it gets the variable/collection and file name because everything has the same name.<p>What I haven't found is a place where it explains what RoR is doing, so you know that when you have an error, this is why.<p>I think we are just supposed to blindly follow the 'it just works' mantra, which has never really worked for me with Apple, and I'm barely holding it together with RoR.<p>As far as documentation goes, it is tough to beat PHP. The documentation is really good, and the language/framework doesn't do the work for you, so you build a page, put something into the db, get it out, put it on this page, call it from that page, etc. You build your own structure so you know where things are and how things work.<p>The tutorials I've seen keep going through the very same basic stuff of getting RoR to build crud operations for you, or how to change a view. But getting into the meat of RoR is proving to be much more difficult.

From the perspective of someone who is looking for a first programming language or a language that is dead simple to use for basic tasks, I think Ruby is a great choice.<p>I think this is primarily because the syntax can be very intuitive, especially compared to something like perl. Ruby code is generally readable even to someone who doesn't know Ruby (there are some exceptions of course, as Ruby can be very terse in the right hands).<p>There are also a ridiculous number of gems that are easy to install and use. Need to do document classification? There's a gem for that (classifier). Need to access a database and want to do it through Ruby objects? There's a gem for that (sequel).

Rails.<p>Prior to Ruby on Rails, most people's exposure to web dev was PHP. Go from doing PHP by hand for the simplest CRUD based pages, to the magic of Rails that magically does half the work for the same page. That magic gained the language not just converts, but fans on the level of Apple fans.<p>There are other choices these days, but thats where the fandom originates from.

Although Ruby is a very productive language, I think its more about the community. Its moving incredibly fast, and the people in the community are doing really awesome things right now. Resources for programmers are abundant.

Ruby is toast, now that we have node.js you can do just about everything with JavaScript alone.