Observations on Ruby

I recently had to interview a candidate who used Ruby, so I prepared a question and implemented a solution in Ruby. Before I could tackle the problem itself, however, I had to first learn Ruby, a language I'd brushed up against many times in the past but never learned.

The first hour, of course, was spent setting up Emacs. I largely copied the Ruby configs of Prelude, a popular Emacs "starter kit".

After that, I dove into the finer points of the Ruby language. Here are some observations:

• Syntax is nice for a non-Lisp
• Community is large, so there are a lot of answers to basic questions on platforms like StackOverflow
• Documentation is good
• Function style is encouraged: map instead of for, etc.
• Missing the basics of "true" functional languages, e.g. immutable data structures

Overall, Ruby is a nice language, but I can see why some in Ruby community have embraced Clojure. Clojure takes many of the nice things about Ruby–reasonable syntax, functional style, etc.–further than Ruby does or ever will. Bozhidar made the same point in a presentation on Ruby 4.0, in which he argues that languages like Clojure and Elixir are the "next-gen" Ruby.

Discussions with colleagues and friends have convinced me that functional programming is still a very niche thing. In the meantime, languages like Ruby can gently nudge people in the right direction.