From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-01-22T08:45:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Reasons to consider learning Ruby?

Preston Crawford wrote:

> Also, do any of you have a feeling as to the future of Ruby? I know these 
> things can change on a dime, but my main interest in this regard is that I 
> know many shops are considering non-web-based Open Source solutions to 
> replacing existing Visual C++ and VB applications. Acting as an oracle 
> (i.e. taking a guess :-) ) what kind of future do you think Ruby has in 
> this regard?

See http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby for how Ruby is getting 
used. Lately we have received lots of coverage because of the wonderful 
Rails framework, there's lots of interesting applications getting 
implemented in it like for example 43things.com.

I think we'll continue to grow rapidly in that direction, though I'm 
pretty sure we can also do well in other areas.

Regarding rapid development of desktop GUIs you might be interested in 
http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/ruby/, 
http://visualwx.altervista.org/ and Glade in combination with Ruby-GTK2.
(wxWidgets looks native on pretty much all platforms and GTK2 can at 
least look native on Windows as well.)

Personally, I've used Ruby in lots of areas successful already and am 
pretty sure that the language will continue to grow.

Other than that just enjoy yourself and don't worry too much about the 
future. After all making the future happen is one of the things that's 
fun to do with Ruby.