RE: Re: RE: Ruby's purpose?

Other than the language being fun, I have to make a living,
what can it
do for me that i don’t already have?

Express the solution in a clear and elegant fashion ;-D
, but your existing platforms may have that already for the desired
domain. At the end of the day Ruby is just another language.

  • It’s fully OO from the ground up (everything is an object) which is
    nice. Not tacked on like C++ and derivatives like Java, C#, Perl, PHP
    etc.
    +/- It’s not the fastest out there but the expression of purpose can
    provide hidden gains.
  • It’s certainly powerful. You can use it to develop a Web Server
    (WebBrick, Mongrel or a complete Web framework (Rails) and lots more
    besides.
  • It’s still maturing, the library certainly isn’t as big as Perl’s CPAN
  • It’s brief without being terse.
  • It’s principle of “least surprise” to an experienced Ruby developer.

It’s suits Matz’s purpose it may suit yours, you wont know till you try.
Even if you don’t end up using Ruby you may learn some programming
constructs that will be useful to you existing toolset. I think it was
Chad F. that advocates learning a new language every year or so.

I don’t think anyone on the list can tell you if Ruby is right for you.
You’ll have to take a look at it and make the assesment yourself. Most
problems can be solved in any Von-Neumann complete language.

The expression of being fun is by no means an indicator of a toy
language. It’s more an expression of “I enjoyed writing that code, it
went the way I expected, or, why don’t all languages express construct X
that way because it was easy to express and made sense”.