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Comment by tferris | Hacker News Reader

OT and hijacking this thread:

1. Who is actually new to Ruby?

(After Ruby or rather the popular RoR is there almost for a decade everyone should have made some experiences with Ruby, so I am wondering if there are many new Rubiest)

2. What new language/stack did you start to learn recently?

(for me: Node.js)

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As a Python guy I never had any reason to need to learn Ruby. And even now that I'm playing around with it it's purely out of professional curiosity.

For what it's worth, Ruby has always been more about "want" than "need" for me. When I really need to get something done, fast, I'll choose Python; Python always seems to have an esoteric-but-very-necessary lib for every situation. But Ruby is where I want to spend my fun time.

Opinions will differ, of course. Both languages are tops.

> Who is actually new to Ruby?

I suspect your comment is being buried for the pretentiousness of that question. Plenty of people are still new to Ruby, because you absolutely do not need Ruby to have a successful development career. Not to mention the population of individuals who are completely new to programming.

As a heavy Ruby user who is also regularly hiring:

In my experience it is still vastly harder to hire someone with any degree of Ruby exposure vs. PHP developers, for example.

Ruby is still a niche language.

That was narrow minded. You know it's possible to be a developer and never touch a web app stack professionally, right? Let alone the One True Language that is Ruby.

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