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I agree that Ruby has some neat tricks (syntactic and otherwise), but when you look at development speed, bug reduction, etc., it’s hard to argue that any of them gives Ruby as big an advantage over Java or Python as the advantage that all scripting/VM languages have over manual-memory-management languages like C/C++. Closures? I remember being excited about them ten years ago when I was coding a lot in Scheme (another great programming language), but in the end, they didn’t make much of a difference in how I worked. Automatic introspection? I’m a touch typist, so saving 30 seconds of typing here or there isn’t significant.

I may come over to Ruby some day (it definitely has the most fun tutorials), but it’s also possible that before then some other language will find another low-hanging fruit like memory management that blasts Ruby, Java, Python, and everyone else right out of the water, the way that Java has blasted C/C++ for enterprise development.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index

Now that Perl is huge (indeed, many would say *too* huge, and past its prime), does Larry Wall move on to something new? No, he’s still working on Perl. Of course, he wrote the language, but the same goes for Tom Christiansen and Damian Conway.

I’m sure the same thing could also be said in the Python world. Now that Python is gaining popularity, are the serious wizard-level Python programmers saying “Oh, dear, it seems the proles have arrived. How teddibly gauche they are. I must go and become a Boo guru now, just to avoid these tedious plebeians”? Somehow, I don’t think so.

This assumes that “Elite developers” actually care about what the masses use to program with. My guess is that most of them just want to use a (the most) productive language (one in which the development/testing/integration of a certain feature takes the least amount of time, balanced with the highest level of physical performance).

How do you create a market without marketing?

Search for commoditized skills like Java, SQL, C++ and you find x,000 jobs advertised. Ideally of course you’d have a longitudinal view on this; you’d have data on the number of jobs offering requiring this and that skill across time and understand the rise and ebb of particular skills.

Search for niche skills like Python and you find (today) 200 jobs advertised.

Search for Ruby and right now you find 22 jobs on http://www.jobserve.com.

Search for Groovy and you find one actual job. That’s where you want to be; learning a language so esoteric that one day you can be the guru, or at least one of his henchmen. But maybe, maybe the fact that there’s already one job posted means you’re just too late…

To be honest, I saw this idea expressed lucidly in Chad Fowler’s book, available from http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/

I don’t know what color you’d put LISP, though, stuck at step 0, still waiting after several decades for the elite to notice too many riff-raff using it…