The Lair of the Pythia

Back at Mike Pence’s blog today there is news that CodeGear is considering a product for Ruby on Rails. That’s very nice, but who the heck is this Ruby anyway? Ruby Wax? Nope, she’d be more likely to want to be off the rails, I think. A song by Donald Fagen? A new teenage pop star? I figured it was about time I found out.

Ruby, it turns out, is a relatively new programming/scripting language creating by a smart-sounding Japanese guy known as “Matz” (Yukihiro Matsumoto). Quite why it is so wonderful isn’t immediately obvious, but it is object-based, designed to be readable, and it has a garbage collector. This is all good stuff.

The Rails part is the database connection. And now you can start to see the interest from CodeGear. You have a strong object-oriented language with a powerful database backend. What does that sound like?

So far so promising. I suspect I’ll still be using PHP for a while, if only because this is a Wordpress blog, but given the level of interest shown I’m going to spend some time taking a closer look at Ruby. The main downside I can think of right now is lack of hosting options. If I wanted to use it I suspect I’d have to switch hosts. (Heck, Pair, who are otherwise wonderful folks, haven’t even put PHP 5 on general release yet.)

But for now, over to you folks. Any Ruby evangelists out there care to make a pitch?