ACM TechNews

Ruby Is on the Rise

eWeek (05/07/08) Taft, Darryl K.

The number of Ruby developers will quadruple over the next five years, predicts Gartner analyst Mark Driver. He says there are currently under one million professional Ruby developers, but he predicts there will be four million or more by 2013. Driver says Gartner's research shows there is "strong interest" in Ruby and that the percentage of developers that will be creating commercial systems in comparison to the number of hobbyists will be even greater for Ruby than for other programming languages. Nevertheless, Driver says Ruby needs more corporate sponsorship from large organizations. "Ruby is the classic pattern of how technology gets adopted--it's not one big company telling you what technology to use," says Sun Microsystems engineer Chris Nutter. "The people using Ruby now are hackers--it's kind of an organic system." One disadvantage Ruby has in comparison to Java and other more mature languages is it has no official steward or standards body supporting it, but Nutter says there are two projects supporting Ruby's growth. The first is an initiative from the Rubinius project to create a set of specification tests for Ruby to define what the language is. The Rubinius project also is dedicated to creating a next-generation virtual machine for Ruby. The other project is a collaborative effort between all the various Ruby implementers to discuss where Ruby is going.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Ruby-is-on-the-Rise/

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