The Rise of Ruby
Apparently I’m not the only person watching the Tiobe index, because other people have been commenting on Ruby’s new position in the list. A couple of things to note, I’ve been watching the Tiobe list religously for over a year now. When I started watching Ruby was somewhere down in the depths of the unknown languages. I don’t recall it’s exact position, but I remember waiting and hoping it would cross the threshold in into the top 20 languages. After watching it’s meteoric rise for the last year I have been amazed at how quickly it has climbed the chart.
It’s interesting to note that last month Ruby was at the 12th slot on the list, just above PL/SQL. I don’t remember the exact percentage but Ruby was only at around 1.4% and SAS was around it’s current position of 2.2%. I thought at the time that it would take Ruby several months to cover the distance to SAS, but it seems to have made a huge jump this month up to 2.3%. Now remember in their estimation that means that ruby is approximately 2.3% of the programming market!
I wish TIOBE would maintain a historical index of the data so we could see what the positions and percentages were for any given month. And unfortunately the wayback machine only shows as far as April of this year. However when you look at December 2005, there are some interesting peculiarities. Dec. 1 - Dec 3 of 2005 the TIOBE index lists Ruby as 21st in the list with 0.434% of the market. However after December 3 and for the rest of the December Ruby is listed at 26th with 0.317% of the market. I’m not sure what’s going on with their statistics here, but they seem a bit wonky (unless of course somehow the wayback machine was storing it incorrectly).
Let’s use the most conservative number and say that last December Ruby was at 0.434% market penetration where now they are at 2.334%. That represents a 538% increase! I’m sure that Ruby’s growth will slow down at some point, but in all honesty I think those numbers probably lag behind a bit right now. A year ago very few people even know about Ruby, these days I can talk to almost any programmer, even a C# guy and they’ll know what Ruby is. A large chunk of them will even have some interest in learning Ruby. I don’t say even a “C# guy” to lambast the C#’ers, but more to illustrate that a group that isn’t really known for being well versed in open source programming languages is becoming more and more aware of Ruby.
This last year of Ruby has been interesting and exciting at times. It’s becoming easier and easier to convince management that Ruby is acceptable in the enterprise. At my current company Ruby is the de facto language of choice. In the coming year, with the growing awareness of Ruby, will 2007 mark the Rise of Ruby in the mainstream?
I think some of Ruby’s success has to do with companies telling developers what they want in a language/tool. Microsoft assumes they know what we want and offers C#, which is alright, but nothing stellar about it. Same thing with Java. Ruby (and Python) give programmers what they “actually” want and are not controlled by some corporate entity filled with talking heads.
I give a lot of credit to DHH though, he essentially put Ruby on the radar for a lot of people and companies.
Another increasing activity is in the bookstore catalog, take a look at Amazon, and you will find a lot of titles promised for 2007.
Two other elements that are key in Ruby’s success are productivity and reduction of LOC.
I find I’m getting work done 6-7 times faster than I was in C#. I also maintain about 15% of the codebase of an equivalent project in C#/Java