Ruby was my re-entry into programming. Before it, I had tried programming in highschool (c++) and, while I did well at it, felt like it wasn't for me. I was going to go into some other field like Photography instead.
By chance I had to do a programming class in college, and they had put me into the wrong one by accident - a final year software project in Ruby. I did really well at it, fell in love with the language and got into other programming languages from there.
I've been doing Ruby for 12 years now and it's my go-to language when I can choose. My entire programming career has Ruby to thank.
Me too actually. I flirted with programming around uni-time and after - PHP, java, friggin' ada - and just couldn't see myself enjoying it so I went into network management instead.
10 years later I was thoroughly sick of that, so started to look around and heard about this little language called Ruby - and it was love at first sight. Then this little software project called Rails started to gain momentum and there was no looking back. 13 or so years and counting.
And now funnily enough just when I feel like Ruby is lacking a few necessities in our always-connected world, along comes a project which is basically reworking Erlang to look a whole lot more like Ruby - Elixir. I'll always love Ruby but Elixir feels right for the next step, that kind of instant attraction I never felt for the likes of golang. Here's to the next 13 or more years of Ruby-like programming joy!
I don't get this Elixir as the natural progression for Rubyists. OO/mutable Ruby and functional/immutable Elixir are worlds apart beyond the superficial syntax similarities.
> worlds apart beyond the superficial syntax similarities
I never understood this argument. That "superficial" syntax is what I have to stare at, reading and writing, for 8 hours a day. That I actually enjoy doing so is therefore hugely important to me.
I mean, you can make the same argument against Elixir itself, and I've seen it done - Erlang old-timers arguing against the necessity of these "superficial" syntax improvements. Suffice to say that I profoundly disagree.
Ruby does lend itself to writing a lot of functional code. One can write Ruby so that it looks very similar to Bash or other Algol-derivatives, but it's also possible to write code which avoids side effects, mutable state, or variables in general.
Genuine immutability, ie. the deep copy variant, isn't that easy to work with in Ruby. At least not without a significant performance hit and who wants to add a performance hit on top of Ruby's baseline performance?
By chance I had to do a programming class in college, and they had put me into the wrong one by accident - a final year software project in Ruby. I did really well at it, fell in love with the language and got into other programming languages from there.
I've been doing Ruby for 12 years now and it's my go-to language when I can choose. My entire programming career has Ruby to thank.