Why Ruby?

Scott Hanselman has an interestingly titled post ‘Programmer Intent or What you're not getting about Ruby and why it's the tits.’

Ruby is getting a lot of blog-inches and I began to wonder if I should be paying it some attention….. it is near the Stack but the stack is pretty full:

1. SQL Server Analysis Services
2. Consitutional Change in Scotland, including the creation of a bicameral executive
3. Holiday plans
4. Reading more fiction
5. Deciding whether I really care about Python or Ruby or anything like it
6. Millions of other things in my personal and work life…… and I mean millions.

So, as you can see on point 5, Ruby is kinda on there already. I guess the tone is: am I bothered? And to me, an outsider, I am not sure when Ruby becomes interesting; is it only when you are using Ruby on Rails? Should I have an interest because Microsoft is developing IronRuby and and extending the possibilities of IronPython by introducing the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)?

What’s wrong with C#? VB.Net?

But then, in the aforementioned blog post, Scott tells me I can subtract twenty minutes from a date using the following syntax:

20.minutes.ago.

Sad as it is to say, that line of code is pretty impressive.

We’ll see if it makes it onto the Stack. You never know.

Tags: Ruby, Stack, Scott+Hanselman, SQL+Server+Analysis+Services, Programmer+Intent, Dynamic+Language+Runtime, DLR, IronRuby, IronPython