Ruby is Fun

I did C++ for 20 years, and as a die-hard C++ programmer, I disregarded Ruby as just a toy language.

Then I landed a job a few years ago doing Ruby on Rails full time and let me tell you, it has been a breath of fresh air. It's really allowed me to enjoy programming again.

Ruby is the complete opposite of C++. Interpreted instead of compiled. Dynamic instead of statically typed. And yeah, it's slow while C++ is powerful, flexible, fast, low-level, high-level, and everything in-between and can do just about anything. But C++ is so complicated it wears you down just trying to remember everything.

I'll admit that as a dynamically-typed language, it could be easy to introduce certain types of bugs in Ruby that in C++ would be caught much earlier at compile time, but luckily we are very thorough with unit tests and have great code coverage, so it really minimizes these kinds of bugs.

Ruby is such a well-designed language, it is a pleasure to work in. I remember the first time I wrote something like 42.to_s and just reveled in the simple beauty of it.

Ruby is pure.

Ruby is awesome!

And Matz is a nice guy (I met him).