Just noticed How To Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Ruby listed on del.icio.us/popular.
So, this is interesting. I have not yet begun to really dig in to Ruby, but I’m seeing a lot of good reasons to do so; the main reason being that I’m interested not just in using it to write programs. I’m interested in why people are interested in it.
For the single semester I was at the University of Minnesota, my Computer Science professor said something very interesting. We had just wrapped up a section on Scheme and were about to move on to Python, and she was explaining, in a word, why. She was commenting on the meteoric rise of Python, and how it was adopted primarily by individuals and skilled programmers, not by corporations first.
She said something like this: When we see a programming language get very popular like this, we, as computer scientists, are very interested. We want to know why programmers want to use this language; no one is forcing them to use it. They are choosing it. We are interested in why they are choosing to use it, what it is about the new language that they like.
I see a similar thing happening now with Ruby. You aren’t going to find “Skill with Ruby” listed on very many Fortune 500 job descriptions (if any); despite that, it is everywhere. People, primarily programmers and hackers, are really interested in it.
If you are using a programming language to solve a set of tasks, and you already have a good one with which you’re familiar (be it Perl, Python, Java, or whatever), then you could be quite right in saying that there is no compelling reason to learn another one simply because “it’s popular.”
But, if we are interested in computer programming in and of itself, we have every reason to be interested in new, popular languages. Why are they popular? What is making them interesting to people?
I don’t really know when I’m going to find the time to do it, but I’m inching that much closer to getting more familiar with Ruby.
