Would you believe this is my third attempt at writing this piece? The last two were waaaay too long (there’s just so much to cover!) Well let’s start with a few stand-out thoughts on Ruby:
- Ruby is an object of beauty –> inspired & passionate developers
- It’s elegant and concise –> a joy to work with
- Easy to learn but very powerful –> more experienced developers
- Is designed for programmer happiness –> all of the above
Before I go further, I should warn you that these are just my personal thoughts. I’m no programming guru (and relatively new to Ruby.) But, like countless others, I’ve fallen head-over-heels in lurrve with it and am extremely passionate about it (can you tell?)
Why Ruby?
So why would someone choose Ruby over any other language? Well I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can tell you why I turned to it.
In a nutshell, it felt like the closest thing we have to how a language should be written. In other words, it’s the best programming language out there. Let me rephrase that again. Ruby is the only language I came across that ticked most if not all the boxes for my requirements: it’s powerful, easy to learn, has a huge set of libraries, a vibrant community, the best web framework, and (as an unexpected – but crucial – bonus) is a genuine pleasure to use. Ruby was designed specifically with Programmer Happiness™ in mind. If you don’t believe me, ask its creator, Matz.
Why not Python/PHP/Java/[insert other language here]?
I think it’s important to quickly mention two of the main reasons why I think other languages fell short for me:
- They felt more awkward to use (semicolons after every line/poor object models/ill-thought method names/using camelCaseForVariables, etc)
- Or they just don’t have the same appeal – that something special – that I felt Ruby does.
I found Ruby because other languages just didn’t gel with me – they felt convoluted or awkward and just didn’t posses the features that made Ruby stand out to me.
I wasn’t going to talk about other languages too much, but a few people have asked for code comparisons, so here they are. (Python code provided by @excid3, PHP code by @citalan.)
PHP
{
private $_colour;
public function __construct($colour)
{
$this->_colour = $colour;
}
public function is_red()
{
return ($this->_colour == 'red' ? true : false);
}
}
$the_ball = new Ball('green');
echo ($the_ball->is_red() ? '' : 'The ball is not red');
Python
def __init__(self, colour):
self.colour = colour
def is_red(self):
return self.colour == "red"
the_ball = Ball("green")
if not the_ball.is_red():
print "The ball is not red"
Ruby
def initialize(colour)
@colour = colour
end
def is_red?
@colour == "red"
end
end
the_ball = Ball.new("green")
puts "The ball is not red" unless the_ball.is_red?
Notice how clear and concise the Ruby code is? At a glance you quickly see what’s going on – the do ends provide excellent visual boundaries. Not too bare (like Python) but not convoluted like PHPs endless semicolons and brackets either. It strikes the perfect balance. If you really wanted to, you could even write the same code like this:
def initialize(colour); @colour = colour; end
def is_red?; @colour == "red"; end
end
the_ball = Ball.new("green")
puts "The ball is not red" unless the_ball.is_red?
or even like this – without parentheses:
def initialize colour; @colour = colour; end
def is_red?; @colour == "red"; end
end
the_ball = Ball.new "green"
puts "The ball is not red" unless the_ball.is_red?
Most people stick with the original tho – perhaps without parentheses when it’s more appropriate (such as when using Rails or other DSLs).
So what is special about Ruby?
Oh boy, where do I start? It’s clean, uncluttered and has an air of grace and elegance. No trailing semicolons. No need for parentheses for method calls (or definitions) …even hashes don’t need them if they’re the last argument in a call. Ruby is just so refreshing.
Once you get past how gorgeous Ruby code looks, you begin to read it. Ruby’s syntax is clear and concise, and there’s nearly always more than one way of doing something. These nuances matter because they give the language a natural feel – when you read Ruby, it reads better, moreso than what you might be used to in other languages.
Ok so maybe you think all that’s superficial (for the record… it’s not!) but either way – there’s a lot more going on under the hood.
Ruby is a ‘proper’ object orientated language. In fact, almost everything in Ruby is an object. Even classes (being an instance of the class Class.) Each object belongs to the class it was instantiated from, and… it even has it’s very own class, an Eigenclass (sometimes called the Singleton class). This is cool because it means individual objects, can truly be, er, individual! (You can give objects methods that other objects of the same class don’t have.)
You can ‘mix-in’ modules into your classes. Modules are like classes (actually, classes are descended from modules) with the main difference being that you can’t instantiate an object directly from them. A class can include as many modules as you want it to, so they are a great way to organise your code and share functionality between classes. They’re also handy for namespacing (so your class names are less likely to clash with someone else’s).
Ruby also gives us open classes, where you can reopen a class at any point and just add to it. You can even do this to standard classes, such as the String class – how many languages let you do that huh!? You could actually go on to modify existing code. Don’t like how a method works? No problem, change it! This is often referred to as monkey patching – something that often scares people from other languages. But that’s Ruby – it treats you as a grown-up, and lets you decide how responsible (or reckless!) you want to be.
Ruby also gives us code blocks which are great for (amongst other things – such as DSL’s) closures – although we also get bindings for that. Duck typing means we don’t have to declare types beforehand and syntactic sugar lets us create setter methods like this:
name = x
end
Where ‘name=’ is the name of the method. Remember that parentheses are optional in Ruby? Well that, and the fact that Ruby lets us use an equals sign in our methods (as shown above) allows us to go on and do this:
It ignores the space between the equals sign and the rest of the method. Pretty cool, no? And that’s just scratching the surface – there’s loads more on offer!
Ruby also gives us powerful tools and tricks like introspection, dynamic methods, ghost methods, mimic methods, class macros and the creation of classes, methods and other code on-the-fly – something you might have heard of as metaprogramming: code that writes code. We also get proc objects (in a number of flavours) and all the usual stuff you’d expect, such as Arrays, Strings, Hashes, and a lot of others you might not, like method missing, class eval, bang methods and more!
The community
Here I’ll just copy and paste what I wrote in a previous post (What’s special about Ruby on Rails) as pretty much the same applies here.
The Ruby community rocks. You get the feeling everyone is on the same wavelength, most Rails devs seem to use OS X and TextMate for example (even down to the same ‘theme’!) but the conventions run a lot deeper. Whether it’s indentation style or using parentheses in your method definitions or calls (they’re optional in Ruby) there’s a ‘Ruby way’ and most in the community stick to it. It’s not because Ruby users are mindless zombies mind you, it’s because we genuinely like the same things and have similarly high standards.
The most important thing however, is how passionate and helpful the community is. Good enough just isn’t good enough. That’s why test driven development (TDD) is such a big thing in the Ruby community, and why you can rest assured that your peers will always help you stay on top of your game.
As you might expect, with something so cherished at its heart, the community are eager to help each other get the best out of it. Testament to this are all the resources that are not only free but have clearly taken a lot of time and effort to put together. Here’s a quick list:
- tryruby.org – where you get to try (and learn) Ruby in your browser
- the extremely enjoyable Rails for Zombies where the Envy Labs team take you through some gory screencasts then test your knowledge via the
brainbrowser - the fantastic Railscasts which is nearly as old as Rails itself (!)
- Rails Tutorial which is an excellent step-by-step that helps you build a twitter clone.
- the IRC #rubyonrails channel (irc.freenode.net) where there’s always some cheery soul willing to lend a helping hand
- the utterly brilliant Ruby Mendicant University (and Ruby Best Practices from the same person, Gregory Brown).
- Finally I just have to include Rails Hotline where if you get stuck and fancy talking to someone who might be able to help, you can – for free!
Pretty awesome don’t you think? And did I mention they are all free!?
If all of that isn’t enough for you (it should be, but if it isn’t…) then there’s one last thing that I find quite remarkable. I’m fairly new to Ruby, yet many leading or well known figures in the community have taken time out to speak to me. Yehuda Katz talked to me at length about learning Rails. Gregg Pollack was happy to discuss my ideas of where Rails for Zombies could lead. Ryan Bigg made the effort to get a .mobi version of his book (Rails 3 in Action) to me as he was keen on hearing my thoughts, and even DHH (the creator of Rails) has discussed totally unrelated topics via Twitter. And that’s just the people who I know of who are leading figures! I’ve also exchanged tweets with a number of others but won’t include them here for brevity – well apart from Russ Olsen, the author of two of my favourite Ruby books (Design Patterns in Ruby and Eloquent Ruby) who is following me on Twitter. *Faints
It’s fantastic that a large number of people high up in the community are willing to take time out for the nubes. Is there any wonder why the community is as cool as it is?
I’d quickly like to add that the community isn’t just about programmers – many Ruby related businesses are very much part of it too. Companies like Engine Yard, Heroku, 37 signals, Shopify, Envy labs, Thoughtbot, Resolve Digital and countless others who give so much back. Just recently for example, Heroku have taken on Matz (the creator of Ruby) to work on Ruby full time – how brilliant is that!?
Culture
I want to cover culture on its own, because not all of it comes from the community. Of course the Ruby community will push you towards test driven development, writing good clean idiomatic code, contributing back to Ruby or other open source projects and generally helping you become a good Ruby citizen. But some cultural aspects are inherently down to the language itself – bizarre as that might sound.
The most important, and perhaps what will (and should?) make for interesting reading for managers and the ‘enterprise’, is the culture of learning.
If you go back to my list at the start of this post, you’ll see the brief list of things that make for Ruby Programmer Happiness™ – and what do people excel at? Things they enjoy 🙂
I noticed a massive difference in my desire to learn Ruby, compared to PHP. PHP totally uninspired me. Don’t get me wrong, I was as desperate to learn to program as much as I’ve ever been (maybe even moreso back then) but all I wanted to do was get through the PHP books as quickly as possible just to ‘get on with it’. I never really enjoyed PHP, therefore I didn’t enjoy learning it – and that’s a problem, because people will generally only do the minimum or just skim over stuff, never truly understanding things.
Ruby, by contrast, is something I love. I enjoy reading about it and learning as much as I can. My appetite for all things Ruby is insatiable – and I’m not exactly a geek! It is just constantly, pleasantly, surprising me, and things just seem to ‘stick’ more (that’s testament to Matz wanting to make it a ‘natural’ language) so morale is always high. Additionally, because Ruby is very natural and therefore easy to pick up, you get people from all walks of life giving it a go – and that’s brilliant because it brings in creative people that might have otherwise not got into programming at all.
This, I think, is why you get better Ruby programmers. Of a higher skill-set and with more ‘experience’ – we tend to enjoy furthering our knowledge because we enjoy the topic so much. I really can’t stress this point enough, this is the reason (which itself is only there because of all the other factors) why I believe Ruby is going to grow at a phenomenal rate – it’s because we want to, not because we have to (JS/browsers) or we’re told we should do (Java/enterprise).
Everything else
There’s so much more to cover that it would be impossible to cover everything, so I’ll try to keep this brief. Ruby on Rails is widely considered to be the best web framework (see: What’s Special about Ruby on Rails? for more info) – it’s actually what first drew me to Ruby, and like many people, “I came for Rails but stayed for Ruby”! That’s not the only web framework btw, we also have Sinatra and a heap of others too (and also plenty of CMS and blog systems).
There has been over 281 million downloads of around 28 thousand RubyGems (aka libraries). From testing frameworks to web frameworks to authentication systems to backup systems to geocoding tools to e-commerce to email processing – chances are if you’re trying to do something there’s a gem out there that does it!
We also have lots of great learning material – what good is all that power if you’re just not able to learn it effectively? And lots of companies (like Engine Yard) offer sponsorships for training courses (or there’s even the Ruby University which I mentioned earlier).
Hopefully you’re beginning to get an idea why Ruby is special (and there’s a lot I haven’t even covered – such as the various Ruby implementations, like Jruby, Rubinious, MacRuby). Along with the beauty of language itself, we have all these other things – and they all add up to make Ruby the first class package that it is.
Conclusion
A programming language that inspires people is rather special – and Ruby is one that truly does just that. Add in its power, simplicity and elegance and you have a compelling package. One that will help you in work and play – and often blur the line between the two. Wouldn’t you want to get paid to do something you enjoy? I’m not kidding when I say that’s exactly how it is for almost all Rubyists I know – yet another reason why Ruby is special, for you, your boss, your client, and maybe even the world. (Well maybe!)
Where next?
So have I convinced you? If so keep an eye out for an upcoming post (Edit: link added…) where I’ll detail the best way to learn Ruby (& Rails) – but until then, be sure to check out the following
- If you’re new to programming, I urge you to go through Learn to Program by Chris Pine – it’s a lovely introduction to OOP and Ruby.
- If you have some programming experience, then do the excellent Kevin Skoglund Ruby course over at Lynda.com – they are in perfect 5 to 10 minute clips and Kevin really knows his stuff… and knows how to get you to know it!
- After that, check out David A. Black’s The Well Grounded Rubyist – one of my all-time favourite Ruby books. David is a real-life teacher, and it shows. He takes nothing for granted and walks you through every bit of code in the book so you never feel like giving up.
- And after that, get Russ Olsen’s Eloquent Ruby – another firm favourite. Russ is a very experienced programmer of a number of different langauges and he really helps you understand the ‘Ruby way’. When I read this book, I used the highlight function on my Kindle so much that in the end I thought ‘forget that – I might as well re-read the book later’ because I am pretty much highlighting it all anyway!
Don’t forget, keep an eye out for my How to Learn Ruby & Rails post – doing everything I list there will help you become fairly proficient in next to no time.
Good luck – and I hope to welcome you into the Ruby community soon!