As both a Ruby programmer and an DevOps/Infrastructure in the past, I have found Ruby to be a superlative programming environment but just as easy to program in badly as any other. I have never found it harder to run, monitor or debug than any other platform, certainly not harder than building and tuning a Java server platform. Really I think Ruby has been the biggest influence for more brilliant tools and practices in modern development than anything else, even if it doesn’t come close to the performance of a static language.
You're spot on. You can see its influence in a lot of tooling coming after, such as several package managers (from yarn to cargo), java collections syntax, go structural typing, python's gunicorn, JVMs invokedynamic (introduced for jruby originally), among others I can't remember from the top of my head. Several new languages were created, or benefit from the collaboration of ex-rubyists, from elixir to rust to node, which greatly influenced their approach to developer ergonomics. Even if the world would refuse to stop using ruby forever (which will never happen, why would it...), its influence would last for a long time, after which it'd be rediscovered again after the mandatory forgetfulness cycle.
Some great examples there, and look at how many frameworks are “$LANG on Rails”!
Rubyists introduced me to automated provisioning and deployment - Puppet, Chef, Capistrano - as well as concepts like test-driven-development and the genius of metaprogramming, but it’s common to hear javascripters waxing lyrical about TDD while slagging off Ruby.
Ruby is like 12-Bar Blues: people who love rock music don’t always like hearing blues. My favourite story is about seeing Earl Slick and Bernard Fowler performing Bowie, and they struck up a long bluesy intro which caused one of the two older fellas standing next to me at the bar to turn to me and say, “I really don’t like all this blues crap!” only for the “blues crap” to become The Jean Genie two seconds later.
Careful what threads you try and unravel as they may weave your own narrative…
