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I owe my career and livelihood to Ruby, Rails and the community. When I started learning programming I was overwhelmed because of c, c++ and JavaScript. Tried a

I owe my career and livelihood to Ruby, Rails and the community. When I started learning programming I was overwhelmed because of c, c++ and JavaScript. Tried a bit of Python too. I thought I would never get a hold of any programming language ever. One day I tried this mysterious language from Japan(That's how I knew Ruby at the time) on tryruby.org. Ruby was breath of a fresh air. Code read like English. I was making small CLIs which required so much work in every other language. That was enough to get me hooked. Then I learned about Rails and never looked back. Happy to see this language making new strides with this release. This is a thank you note to Matz and the community.

Papirola 6y ago
same for me. it set me free from Java. Ruby is truly a gift.
pmcollins 6y ago
couldn’t agree more. learning ruby and rails (in 2007 when things were much simpler) was a truly beautiful experience for me. i consider rails and ruby to be one of humanity’s great works of art.
- tutfbhuf 6y ago
  How complicated is rails in 2021?
  - herbst 6y ago
    More, but not a lot (comparingly)
  - izietto 6y ago
    I'd say less than 10 years ago, because many not-so-edge cases have been fixed, and the new sections of the framework (activestorage, active job) simplified the development of some features that were harder to integrate some time ago
  - speleding 6y ago
    A new Rails 6 project will by default install web packer, to mention just one thing that is likely to trip up beginners. On the rails of yesteryear you would just drop a JS file in a folder and it would "just work".
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
    Some things are more complicated, and some things are less. RESTful resources which seem so core to Rails were not part of Rails until 2.1 I believe. Also Bundler and the Asset Pipleline while having some growing pains really did solve significant problems of early Rails apps in production. Personally I still prefer the old school ujs patterns over the new JavaScript but I’ll still a request/response proponent so I may in the minority there.
- ljm 6y ago
  I remember Ruby on Rails first being announced, and Why's Poignant Guide, and the first PragProg book about Rails (as well as Try Ruby). Back then I was a teenager and doing most of my stuff in PHP, because in 2006/2007 most of the resources about PHP and MySQL I could find were all about that, and I was still at the level of just injecting some PHP into my HTML to make it dynamic (back then Javascript/DHTML was something you copied and pasted and there was only rarely a reason to seriously use it). This was the era of PHP, Cold Fusion, classic ASP, CGI and so on. Not to mention that shared hosting providers (the cheapest option for web hosting) only really gave you PHP under Apache to work with (or the LAMP stack as it were). So this Ruby on Rails looked cool but I couldn't get my head around it at first, I was still super green. Skip forward from 2007 to 2009, right before my first professional gig, and the seed had gestated. Suddenly I was running a minimal Rack/Sinatra server around a Redis app purely because I needed a leaderboard and I learned about things like ZRANK and ZADD before I understood what sorted sets were. I did try to advocate for Ruby at my first job but they were of the mindset that literally anything and everything could be built through Drupal. I will leave that thought to your imagination, although I owe my team mate a lot for properly mentoring me when it came to javascript, closures (back in the day where articles about closures in JS were the same as more recent articles about monads.) He didn't just show me jquery, he gave me the low-down on JS itself. I'm made redundant and after that, I go deeper into Ruby. I get a job in London of all places and thus began my career as a full stack engineer specialising mainly in Rails, and Ruby. My interested in the language grew ever stronger and it remains strong to this day, a good 10 years later. I dabble in a lot of other things these days too, because that's what I enjoy, but I'll always find myself back with Ruby when I need to be pragmatic. It's a beautiful language with a strong community that values developer experience, and my only real wish is that I learn enough to be able to contribute back to the language in a meaningful way,
  - aledalgrande 6y ago
    Why's Poignant Guide <:"-) that was epic.
pliftkl 6y ago
Ruby played a big role in helping me rediscover my love of programming, and it also acted as a bit of a gateway drug to think much more about language design and to explore a lot of other languages. I don't use Ruby much anymore, but it will always have a big place in my heart.
davidrupp 6y ago
In 2008, I ran across DHH in an Apple store in Chicago, and got to thank him in person for Rails. Similar story for Matz and Ruby in 2013. My current work is mostly Java, which is tolerable since Java 7/8, but I always enjoy revisiting Ruby and Rails when I get the opportunity. Great to see this continued progress and investment in the language.
Railsify 6y ago
Same here: There are programming languages that are faster or can be ranked higher on technical aspects based on the type of project but none are Fun, Ruby is Fun.

Papirola 6y ago

same for me. it set me free from Java. Ruby is truly a gift.

pmcollins 6y ago

couldn’t agree more. learning ruby and rails (in 2007 when things were much simpler) was a truly beautiful experience for me. i consider rails and ruby to be one of humanity’s great works of art.

tutfbhuf 6y ago
How complicated is rails in 2021?
- herbst 6y ago
  More, but not a lot (comparingly)
- izietto 6y ago
  I'd say less than 10 years ago, because many not-so-edge cases have been fixed, and the new sections of the framework (activestorage, active job) simplified the development of some features that were harder to integrate some time ago
- speleding 6y ago
  A new Rails 6 project will by default install web packer, to mention just one thing that is likely to trip up beginners. On the rails of yesteryear you would just drop a JS file in a folder and it would "just work".
- thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
  Some things are more complicated, and some things are less. RESTful resources which seem so core to Rails were not part of Rails until 2.1 I believe. Also Bundler and the Asset Pipleline while having some growing pains really did solve significant problems of early Rails apps in production. Personally I still prefer the old school ujs patterns over the new JavaScript but I’ll still a request/response proponent so I may in the minority there.
ljm 6y ago
I remember Ruby on Rails first being announced, and Why's Poignant Guide, and the first PragProg book about Rails (as well as Try Ruby). Back then I was a teenager and doing most of my stuff in PHP, because in 2006/2007 most of the resources about PHP and MySQL I could find were all about that, and I was still at the level of just injecting some PHP into my HTML to make it dynamic (back then Javascript/DHTML was something you copied and pasted and there was only rarely a reason to seriously use it). This was the era of PHP, Cold Fusion, classic ASP, CGI and so on. Not to mention that shared hosting providers (the cheapest option for web hosting) only really gave you PHP under Apache to work with (or the LAMP stack as it were). So this Ruby on Rails looked cool but I couldn't get my head around it at first, I was still super green. Skip forward from 2007 to 2009, right before my first professional gig, and the seed had gestated. Suddenly I was running a minimal Rack/Sinatra server around a Redis app purely because I needed a leaderboard and I learned about things like ZRANK and ZADD before I understood what sorted sets were. I did try to advocate for Ruby at my first job but they were of the mindset that literally anything and everything could be built through Drupal. I will leave that thought to your imagination, although I owe my team mate a lot for properly mentoring me when it came to javascript, closures (back in the day where articles about closures in JS were the same as more recent articles about monads.) He didn't just show me jquery, he gave me the low-down on JS itself. I'm made redundant and after that, I go deeper into Ruby. I get a job in London of all places and thus began my career as a full stack engineer specialising mainly in Rails, and Ruby. My interested in the language grew ever stronger and it remains strong to this day, a good 10 years later. I dabble in a lot of other things these days too, because that's what I enjoy, but I'll always find myself back with Ruby when I need to be pragmatic. It's a beautiful language with a strong community that values developer experience, and my only real wish is that I learn enough to be able to contribute back to the language in a meaningful way,
- aledalgrande 6y ago
  Why's Poignant Guide <:"-) that was epic.

pliftkl 6y ago

Ruby played a big role in helping me rediscover my love of programming, and it also acted as a bit of a gateway drug to think much more about language design and to explore a lot of other languages. I don't use Ruby much anymore, but it will always have a big place in my heart.

davidrupp 6y ago

In 2008, I ran across DHH in an Apple store in Chicago, and got to thank him in person for Rails. Similar story for Matz and Ruby in 2013. My current work is mostly Java, which is tolerable since Java 7/8, but I always enjoy revisiting Ruby and Rails when I get the opportunity. Great to see this continued progress and investment in the language.

Railsify 6y ago

Same here: There are programming languages that are faster or can be ranked higher on technical aspects based on the type of project but none are Fun, Ruby is Fun.