Chad Fowler Remembers Ruby

On Saturday morning, with full knowledge that I was about to embark on a journey into the center of Smalltalk, I did what I always did: loaded up my Web browser and searched for the Language of the Week. I’m not sure where I first heard about Ruby. It had been a few years earlier. But this Saturday morning, a post from (Pragmatic) Dave Thomas on the Extreme Programming mailing list is what made me decide on Ruby as my weekend project.

I quickly learned the syntax, discovered ERb (“Embedded Ruby”), and rewrote and deployed my weblog software in Ruby as a CGI framework with a mysql backend. I did all this by around lunch on Saturday. I’d been in this new language routine for quite a while and I’d never made this much progress so quickly. It was bizarre. On Sunday, I came back to Ruby. And on Monday evening after work. And so on.

On the down side, I never really got that good at Smalltalk.

via The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

An enjoyable history of Ruby, Rails, and language innovation