#29: Language Spotlight — Ruby

Deploy Friday

We continue the Deploy Friday Language Spotlight series with the programming language Ruby. Our two guests, developers Emily Giurleo and Jason Charnes, talk about their love for Ruby and what to expect with the Ruby 3.0 release.

The benefits of Ruby

Ruby is a favorite to introduce newcomers to coding, along with Python and JavaScript. The father of the Ruby programming language, Yukihiro Maksumoto, likes to say, “Ruby sparks programming joy.” While he may be biased, Emily and Jason agree. “I think that's a really apt way to put it. It's really fun and satisfying to write Ruby. And I think it makes people want to program.” says Emily.

Ruby sparks programming joy with its many benefits, such as:

• Straightforward syntax makes the language user-friendly and intuitive.
• Opinionated: Jason says the framework itself helped him “ramp up” more quickly.
• Community: Creative, curious, fun, kind, supportive, friendly, and loves problem-solving, according to Emily and Jason.
• Surprising flexibility: Jason quotes David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, “Ruby gives you sharp knives. And if you're trained, you know how to use them. If not, you can cut your fingers off.”

Jason goes into more detail, “Ruby was really easy to understand while I was learning new concepts. It simplified things for me because the syntax just doesn't get in your way. That really sparked my love of programming and took it to the next level. So for me, I think Ruby is special because of the joy I get writing it. It’s syntactically very user-friendly.”

What’s new with Ruby 3.0

With Ruby 3.0 coming down the pipeline, there’s a lot for developers to get excited about. Emily and Jason tell us what they’re ready for.

• New syntax
• Automatic memory compaction: Emily says, “In Ruby 3.0, memory compaction is going to be automatic, which should hopefully fix a lot of the issues that people are experiencing with memory bloat and memory leaks.”
• Pattern matching
• Faster: The goal with Ruby 3.0 is to make it 3 times faster than Ruby 2.0, something Jason says the team has been working on incrementally over the past 5 years.
• New ways to declare methods

Try Ruby on Platform.sh to experience programming joy for yourself.
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