I see Brenda talking about wanting to use "Ruby", and trying to install "Rails". This conflating of the two terms annoys me.

"Ruby on Rails" is a web development framework which is written in Ruby, and which uses Ruby for some customisation, but the primary learning curve in using it is to learn the framework. I installed it ("apt-get install rails", of course :-) and tried using it but found it frustrating, though that may be because the default Debian install was against MySQL.

Ruby, on the other hand, is a language which is generally just as suited to writing off-line text processing scripts as it is to writing on-line scripts. It is also a language which has good database independence and GUI libraries.

Two of the talks I went to at LCA this year which have had an impact on my coding were one about Puppet, a systems management application written in Ruby, and one about writing GTK programs in several languages. The GTK people didn't quite make it through their ambitious schedule so we only got to see them writing GTK in C and in Java (not in Python) but it did suggest how easy it all was.

When I got back to NZ I put those two together and started writing (well, rewriting really) an application in Ruby/GTK, and I have found it a very nice language. It seems that every time I learn something new about Ruby my code gets shorter and provides more function in a clearer and more readable way. Fun.