Ruby is…
…an elegant and powerful programming language that’s particularly well-known for its use in web development.
…the language of Sinatra, a simple and flexible web framework used by companies like Disney and Stripe.
…the language of Rails, a “batteries-included” web framework used by companies like GitHub, Airbnb, Shopify, and Square.
And Ruby is good for many other things as well.
Ruby and its gems
There are thousands of different software packages, or “gems”, available in the Ruby language.
Ruby gems include everything from web frameworks like Sinatra and Rails to image processing, online payments, job scheduling, and more.
Ruby is also the language of Homebrew, the best package manager for macOS.
Finally, Ruby’s original programming niche was actually shell scripts for executing programs at the command line. Naturally, Ruby excels at this task as well.
Because of its combination of power and intuitive design, Ruby makes for an excellent first, second, or third programming language. Which brings us to…
Escaping the monoglot trap
If you ask experienced developers about it, they’ll all agree: it’s important to know more than one programming language.
For many years, learning web technologies has meant learning JavaScript, the only language that runs inside web browsers.
This has led to the alarming situation where some people think JavaScript is the only language they need to know. The horror!
Learning Ruby lets you escape this monoglot trap by immediately adding a second language to your toolkit. (And, off the record, we think Ruby is a much nicer language than JavaScript. But please don’t tell our JS-loving friends we said that.)
In addition, Ruby has design similarities with several other important languages, including Python and Elixir, so it’s a great foundation for further learning.
You’ll be a computer-language polyglot in no time!
Having fun
Perhaps most important of all, Ruby is just fun. Which is no surprise, since its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, specificially designed it to “optimize for programmer happiness”.
Ruby: a delightfully fun language that has tons of useful software and lets you write web apps that are instantly available to billions of people. What’s not to love?
