Why Ruby?
 

I've been looking all over the internet and I can't understand why I would want to use Ruby? What is it's best use? I imagine it's probably not the language you would pick for a visual rendering system. I want to use Ruby if I can find good uses for it.

Whenever in doubt, I consult www.wikipedia.com. Personally, I know that it's a great starter language, but also a very good one, some similarities with python i.e. interpreted, scripting language. In fact, before I did start with Python, I had to make a decision between it and Ruby. I went for Python, mainly cos of the bigger user base.

Ruby on Rails

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Rudl/ruby

Ruby is a language with some very advanced features. For a skilled programmer, this can make it very fast to program. However, in terms of running time it's rather inefficient.

Ruby is best used on high-level systems that don't need lots of CPU, such as a web application.

Thanks for the responses. I'll keep this in mind in case I have any applications for it. Should I start with Ruby or just jump straight into Ruby on Rails.

If you read _Why's that should be enough. It's pretty hard to learn RoR withouth knowing a bit of ruby. I'm sure it's possible, but you'll be able to get a lot more out of it with a tad bit of ruby knowledge. However, don't worry about mastering the language. You could also try the pickaxe(programming ruby, the pragmatic programmers guide) if you have previous programming experience or if you want a little more formal tutorial than _why gives.

Oh, and you might want to look into Nitro, the alternative to RoR. Personally I like the freedom it gives a bit more. It's still in beta and isn't as feature or tutorial rich as RoR, but I think it has a lot of perks.

What I really like about Ruby is the thoughtfulness of the design. Very "clean", and consistent. It's OOP the way OOP was meant to be done, imo.

Also, I'd be amiss not to mention the wonderful writing that went into "The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide".

With that in your sights, you feel like you could trip, fall, and break your toe, but learn something about Ruby on the way down! :D

Adak

One would use Ruby in the kind of situation where one would use Perl or Python- it's a very high-level but inefficient language. This kind of language is generally referred to as a "scripting" language, although I would be hesitant to refer ro something as complex as RoR as a collection of "scripts."

I think that is also the reason I love Ruby. Everything is consistent. Classes and constants are capitalized with camel-case. Variable names and methods use lowercase and underscores. Everything works as expected. I know I'm just repeating what other people have said here, but usually I can guess the correct way to do something new.

I cannot say the same of Python.
Naming conventions vary, there are obscure additions like method = classmethod(method), and seperate parts of the language act and feel very very different; almost as if a bunch of unrelated parts were bundled together.