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A friend emailed me asking what I thought about Ruby. I've only recently picked up a book on Ruby and am charmed by its comprehensive non-annoyingness. Here's what I wrote back to him. What do you think?

Will it take off? I doubt it. I think it has been steadily gaining over
the past few years, but there isn't anything so revolutionary about its
design or its culture that I think will let it dethrone Perl, PHP, and
Python (perhaps it's the lack of a letter P). At least not in the US. Ruby
originated in Japan, and may well be a leading scripting language there.
It's well-enough known, it has its O'Reilly books, but I don't see it
becoming THE HOT THING. It certainly has little traction in big software
companies.

There is a web application framework for Ruby called Rails [here's a promising recent article], which is rumored
to be a very lightweight, easy-to-start-with framework. Their website has a
10 minute video where someone installs it and builds a sample site. This
is highly laudable in a world where suits insist on web applications written
in J2EE, a framework so byzantine that it makes Software Architects
confident they cannot understand the details of programming, while making Programmers confident they cannot understand the scope of design.