Why Ruby become popular only recently

[Pradeep bhatt]

If I am not wrong Ruby has been into existence before Java.Why is that it caught people's attention only recently - a year or two.

[Lasse Koskela]

Most people seem to tribute Ruby's recent popularity to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt who wrote a book about Ruby in English and to Ruby on Rails, which offered the web development community at large with a low barrier to entry to creating useful applications using Ruby.

[Pradeep bhatt]

Originally posted by Lasse Koskela:
Most people seem to tribute Ruby's recent popularity to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt who wrote a book about Ruby in English and to Ruby on Rails, which offered the web development community at large with a low barrier to entry to creating useful applications using Ruby.

Thanks. So is Rails a new framework - not as old as Ruby ?.

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by Pradip Bhat:
So is Rails a new framework - not as old as Ruby ?.

Yes.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Originally posted by Pradip Bhat:
If I am not wrong Ruby has been into existence before Java.

Turns out it had its first public release in 1995 -- the same year as Java did. If you count Oak/WebRunner as Java, though, that had some public dissemination in 1994, a year before Ruby.

[Justin Gehtland]

I'd personally attribute some of it to the lack of a major corporate sponsor; Ruby has been, and always will be, open source and without a major backer. Also, Ruby is at heart still an interpreted language, and only recently have our standard computers been able to hide the inherent performance differences between interpreted and compiled code. Couple that with the immense popularity (some would say "hype") around Rails, and you have a perfect storm: older, stable language that has flown under the radar suddenly catapulted into the spotlight. The classic overnight success story, as long as you ignore the 10+ years of toiling in near-obscurity. ;-)

[Sree Va]

OR

A soft corner to Japanese.

OR

The Japanese Inventions are better, always.

[Mark Ju]

For me, it was the discovery of Basecamp & 37 signals & "web 2.0", which lead to discovery of Rails, which lead to discovery of Ruby.

[Pradeep bhatt]

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:


Turns out it had its first public release in 1995 -- the same year as Java did. If you count Oak/WebRunner as Java, though, that had some public dissemination in 1994, a year before Ruby.

This link says that Ruby was born in 1993 and public release was done in 1995.
http://faq.rubygarden.org/entry/show/5?controller_prefix=faq%2F