Why Do People Fall in Love with Ruby?

Here at RubyGarage we’re big fans of the Ruby programming language and use the Ruby on Rails framework to develop most web applications for our clients. RubyGarage has grown to around 70 employees – almost 30 of whom are Ruby developers – since its founding in 2011.

We’ve chosen Ruby out of hundreds of programming languages. Over the past five years both junior and senior developers have recognized its values. Now it’s time to share what’s made our developers fall in love with Ruby.

Reason?1: Ruby is Simple and Clear

Our developers love the simplicity and clarity of Ruby’s syntax. And our developers aren’t alone. Vladimir Demchenko says he first loved Ruby precisely because of its syntactic beauty and readability. Other developers, while talking about Ruby’s syntax, also described its beauty:

I fell in love with Ruby due to its simplicity in understanding and use, its elegance and readability. Bogdan Cherevatenko Ruby is pretty simple and clear. It behaves very predictably and it has lovely syntax. Taras Kravchenko

Denis Kostyrko focused on Ruby’s readability, saying that "It’s simple to write code in Ruby and read someone else’s. Code reads like a book." Most methods and classes are named very logically, and at first glance they’re easy to understand.

But to read like a book, code must be well-written – no matter what language you’re working in. Clarity should be the main goal of any programmer. And well-written code in Ruby brings one more advantage that our developer Bogdan Cherevatenko mentions:

In well-written Ruby code, perhaps even a non-programmer can understand (in general terms) what happens and where. Bogdan Cherevatenko

In addition to the comments above, we want to share a funny – but true – story about how Roma Mukhin, one of our Ruby developers, fell in love with Ruby because of its simplicity:

I was attending Ruby courses at RubyGarage and liked everything about this language, even its name. But finally I fell in love with Ruby when my friend who was attending Java courses sent me code of the game ‘Rock-paper-scissors’ written in this language. I decided to write this game too, but in Ruby. And what did I finally get? The game written in one line of code.

Roma adds that maybe now he wouldn’t be impressed by that first rock-paper-scissors game he wrote, but at that time he was impressed by how easy it was to build.

Reason?2: The Friendly Ruby Community

Stuck on a programming problem or just have a question? You’re always welcome to reach out to the Ruby community. The global Ruby community is filled with generous developers who enjoy helping others. It’s a group where everybody is interested in discussing and learning from each other. That’s what our developer Bogdan Cherevatenko means when he says: ‘The Ruby Community was more educated and cultured’ than the communities around other programming languages. Let’s see how other developers express their love of the Ruby community.

I love Ruby because of its community. I’ve never met such a friendly and active community. People love to share their solutions with others, and it really helps to solve a lot of problems. Roman Grytsay

The Ruby community offers a lot more than social gatherings with friendly Rubyists; the Ruby community maintains tons of helpful resources available online, including frameworks, gems, and tutorials. Most of our developers point to the benefits of Ruby libraries — Gems, Gems, and more Gems that can solve many trivial and specific problems.

There are a lot of gems that solve many specific tasks. All that you need is to google and you’ll almost always find a ready-made solution that you’ll just need to connect and a little configure for your concrete task. Taras Kravchenko Reason?3: Ruby on Rails

George Zhukov says that he loves Ruby first and foremost because of Rails – specifically, because it’s so easy to launch a startup and develop an MVP with Rails. For startups, it’s important not to spend too much time on initial development, and Rails solves this problem. How? Taras Kravchenko explains:

Rails does a lot of useful and cool things automatically and by default. It means that you don’t even think about it, and don’t waste time on inventing the bicycle with every new project (where and what to store, how to set it up, etc.). Taras Kravchenko

Vladimir Demchenko adds that Ruby on Rails stands out from other competing frameworks:

For example if we take PHP, there are a lot of frameworks to choose between and it’s really difficult for programmers when you often change projects. In Ruby everything is predictable. If a project is a web application, it will likely be developed in Rails. Vladimir Demchenko More Reasons to Fall in Love with Ruby

We highlighted these three big reasons why our developers have fallen in love with Ruby. But there are other reasons why our developers have come to love this language.

Our developer Roman Grytsay says he loves Ruby even without Rails, and he solves some of the tasks and problems just using Ruby programming language and functional programming. Vadim Lazebny mentions helpful tools for metaprogramming and functional programming in Ruby. And Bogdan Cherevatenko says that it makes him happy that there’s a large database of helpful (and cool) methods for working with all types of data (particularly with lines, massives and hashes).

Wrapping Up

For us here at RubyGarage, the Ruby programming language is something like a sport – we’re loyal to our team. We do what we love, and we love what we do. And that’s the greatest thing about Ruby – we get to develop great product for our clients and their end-users with love!

Ready to join the Ruby club? We’d be glad to welcome you!

Originally published at rubygarage.org.