Sunday, April 10, 2005

Looking at Ruby

Jim Weirich is a bit of a local (Cincinnati) legend. He has been modesty and quietly mentioning an up and coming programming language in various local users' groups and forum's for years.

It's a measure of how entrenched a culture can get that even when highly respected community leaders encourage a new idea, the idea still does not really sink in. So, I kept thinking he was right, but not relevant for my own work and interests. And I kept pushing Ruby down the list of things I wanted to look into.

Finally, after I did study up a little on Ruby, I caught up with Jim. I apologized for ignoring his mild suggestions that Ruby was really something, nice to know.

What was it that finally did it?

Initially, in January of 2005, it was seeing the RubyOnRails framework video.

After that, it was the appreciation of the Ruby culture, and the currently forming RubyOnRails sub-culture. More on that later ...