My deadbeat ex-housemate made me aware of Ruby’s existence in 2001 when he bought the first edition of the Pickaxe book. It would take another two years before I would get my first full-on contact with Ruby thanks to Tom and Joe McDonald at vpop, who used it to develop Blogware for Tucows. Four years later, Ruby (and the framework that popularized it, Ruby on Rails) is my bread and butter at TSOT. In that time, Ruby has gone from “obscure programming language with most of its docs in Japanese” to “the new hotness” to “the whipping boy”. Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite weighs in on Ruby’s popularity cycle in his article Ruby is Soooooo 2002.
I’ll have to write more on this later.