Flatiron Labs
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Flatiron Labs

Why Teach Ruby

Ruby may have a smaller place in the market. But that’s not why you should learn it.

Measuring the popularity of a language is difficult but https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ includes a variety of measurements, from community index to jobs to platform.
IEEE Spectrum also provides a more filterable idea of popularity. https://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2017

Don’t define yourself by your first programming language

We all have our favorites; they are all great; there are 100 memes like this, and ya, I didn’t make that (and am not super into every person in that being a dude except Sarah Palin), but that’s not the point of this post.

So why Ruby, then?

“The goal of Ruby is to make programmers happy. I started out to make a programming language that would make me happy, and as a side effect it’s made many, many programmers happy.”

“Ruby is so… To code ruby is really to love, to feel passion, to feel pleasure, it stirs you inside so greatly, it’s such a beautiful language, also erotic I would say. Method calls striped, undressed of their parenthesis, chaining them together raw like… Just red ebullient jewel.”

“I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose. People are different.”

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We're the technology team at The Flatiron School (a WeWork company). Together, we're building a global campus for lifelong learners focused on positive impact.

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