From: "McLaughlin, James T." <JAMES.T.MCLAUGHLIN@...>
Date: 2007-08-22T00:46:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby off the Rails

-----Original Message-----
>From: ruby-talk-admin@ruby-lang.org
[mailto:ruby-talk-admin@ruby-lang.org] >On Behalf Of celldee
>Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 10:54 AM
>To: ruby-talk ML
>Subject: Ruby off the Rails
>
>I did a quick search on jobserve.com for 'ruby'. I got 60 hits, most
>of which were unsurprisingly asking for RoR developers. I did another
>search for 'perl' and got 958 hits. While I am very pleased that RoR
>is being more widely adopted, it would seem that there is little or no
>demand for Ruby developers outside of rails.
>
>Are there a growing number of non-Rails Ruby jobs that I'm not
>spotting? Or are there really very few organisations that are willing
>to adopt Ruby as a general purpose scripting language?

I too have noticed a lack of Ruby jobs - The only company in my area
that I could find was InfoEther, and they are not hiring.

That being said, I believe it is our responsibility to promote the use
of the "right tool for the right job" whereever we work right now - I am
doing that by using Ruby to support the Biosurvellience data warehouse
that I am working on.  Some of our sources require screen scraping and
the best tools I can find for that are available for Ruby.  

Another thing that will increase the use of Ruby is its inclusion as
standard pre-installed software in Linux distributions.  The sysadmins I
have known are more likely to allow something that already exists on the
distro than something that you have to install from source. 

In my experience, once people get over the initial "ugh this is new"
phase and see how nice it is, using Ruby for even more than just simple
scripting becomes a possibility.  Just take it a little at a time, Perl
has been around since 1987 and Ruby since 1993. 

Jamie