Over the weekend I decided to investigate Ruby and see what all the fuss is about. After reading a few language tutorials I realized that the only way to really get a feel for Ruby would be to write a program. I couldn't think of anything I really needed to write, so I rewrote my Christmas Wishlist program using Ruby on Rails.

The language is great. That's probably not saying much because I'm pretty forgiving of languages. I like Perl, Java, C, C++, assembly. I really don't mind Lisp too much except that I get lost with it pretty quickly. The only language I actually hate is Visual Basic.

Now Ruby on Rails is pretty amazing, I think. MVC, automatic data storage, nice clean URLs. It makes me think of J2EE with 95% less code and 100% less XML. What can be wrong with that.

I decided not to deploy any Ruby on Rails on my website because I just don't have enough RAM in my webserver. And I probably won't start writing Ruby code at work either because nobody else knows it and it would be unmaintainable. Oh, well. It was still fun to learn.