After getting tired of Java's verbosity in 2008, I switched to a Ruby job, where I was fortunate to work with an incredibly talented developer and Ruby expert. It was a joy coding in Ruby after 4 years of Java and XML.

After that, I moved to Groovy, which seemed like a nice middle ground between Ruby and Java, or as I called it at the time: Java as it should have been.

I don't hear much about Ruby and Groovy lately, and while I focused more on front-end development, my back-end work rolled back into Java, which, I admit, has gotten slightly less painful with Java 8. At least in some ways; in other ways, it's just become an even bigger mess where some parts are sensible while other parts are dragging the weight of decades of poor choices with them.

I hear Kotlin is nice, though.

My Ruby skills have gotten a bit stale, sadly. The last thing I did with it was in 2013 I think, when I ran into trouble with Ruby's handling of unicode.