They Say That Time Will Tell.. Ruby Revisited - Part IV

I've written on multiple occasions regarding my flirtations with Ruby (the language) and my ultimate feelings of it falling short of the mark.  I first experimented with Matz's creation in 2003, some 8 years after his initial release.  My first foray was not for professional purposes, but exploratory as a means to best express what would eventually become the SimulaE project which I ultimately crafted in Python.   I did end up writing a machine learning/route optimisation experiment mimicking hospital utilized medicine delivery robots I'd seen at Abington Memorial Hospital in the prior months.  

My conclusions were that Ruby was still too TMTOWTDI than I'd liked.  It all smelled heavily of Perl, which after using for almost ten years (at that point) was less than desirable.  This was long before Rails existed, and it would be another five years before I took another serious look at the language (post Rail's introduction and the famous screencasts which accompanied it).  

Yet here I am five years further down the road from my last foray with the language named fondly after a gemstone.  At this point, I've been coding professionally for over eighteen years, and in general for well over three decades.  I've grown up quite a bit and realised that it was my own issues and pig headedness along with some errant expectations which led to me ignoring Ruby and embracing Python at being closer to the hypothetical "one-true-language."

Years of writing in the BDFL's (Guido van Rossum) creation stemming from the ABC language has done wonders to clarify my deeper understanding of engineering principles, clean code design as well as inconsistencies and even MVC frameworks (Django from v.96-v1.4+).  I believe that it was actually through my understanding of Python interspersed with larger monolithic projects in Perl that drove to my moment of clarity regarding Ruby.  

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't solely the above which led to this epiphany though.  What really finalised it for me was the wonderful Ruby Rogues, the Ruby Freelancer's Podcast and various other podcasts involving Charles Max Wood.  The sheer vastness, diversity and information, knowledge and experience sharing within the Ruby community caught me... hook, line and sinker.   Note: This is a different community (from my own observations) than the Ruby community of Christmas Past as 'eloquently' espoused by the always-blatantly-honest-with-words Zed A. Shaw.

I won't go into the details about what it is in general that made me finally get Ruby this time around but I will say that the recent improvements in the language as a whole and the more natural flow of constructs and method chaining resonate with me as a engineer and polyglot.  The efficiency of :symbols, the consistent smalltalk based mannerisms regarding method invocation and lest we forget the flexibility of code blocks.  I simply leave the reader with this.  Check out the links I've provided.  Listen to the podcasts, try some of the exercises and give an honest assessment of what Ruby has to offer.  I'm really glad I did and now wholeheartedly look forward attending the next Ruby convention which avails itself to my schedule.