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I am very new to Ruby and Rails, so if this is a dumb question, please bear with me.

The ideas that Ruby adopted are not so new and revolutionary. Functional programming, dynamic typing and meta-programming, they exist in other languages as well.

Then why did Rails chose Ruby, but not Python, Scheme, JavaScript or any other language?

What features of Ruby helped Rails to prosper?

Cui Pengfei 崔鹏飞
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  • Ruby on Rails is a framework with Ruby as language. So you shold ask for comparison of Ruby with languages like Python, Scheme, JavaScript, i guess. – Tsunamis Sep 11 '12 at 15:19
  • This is not a question suited for SO. The answer is probably simply an anecdote about how the language was chosen. As you say, you could implement something like Rails in many other languages as well. – deceze Sep 11 '12 at 15:24
  • I assume for similar reasons Seaside was chosen to be implemented in Smalltalk - the guys doing it just liked the language (in Seaside's case, probably the environment). – Cubic Sep 11 '12 at 15:32
  • Interestingly, Avi Bryant was a Ruby developer, and he started to develop a continuation-based web framework called Iowa in Ruby. He switched to Smalltalk after meeting some old Smalltalk graybeards that were hanging around in the hallways at OOPSLA which was colocated with another conference where he was giving a talk about Iowa. – Jörg W Mittag Sep 11 '12 at 22:57

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There's this keynote by DHH which is somewhat related.

And here's an interview with Jason Fried, which touches this question.

Jason: Ruby on Rails is the open source web application framework we extracted from Basecamp. When we built Basecamp we didn't know we were building Rails at the same time, but that's exactly how it happened. Basecamp came first; Rails was born from Basecamp. Basecamp was the divine chicken, Rails was the egg.

I had some natural hesitation about using Ruby at first ("What the #@!* is Ruby?" "Why don't we just use PHP--it served us well before?"), but David Heinemeier Hansson, the first engineer on the Basecamp project, cogently made the case and I bought it. I'm thrilled with the results.

I think it's apparent that David's strong preference for using Ruby in his projects was the key.

Serge Balyuk
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  • Actually, I believe Rails (or rather Basecamp) was DHHs very first (or maybe second, after Instiki) Ruby project. However, he had tried to implement something similar in PHP before, and failed because of limitations in the expressiveness. – Jörg W Mittag Sep 11 '12 at 23:00
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Here's a similar question, with plenty of discussion: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/99192/why-was-rails-written-in-ruby

Also, check out this podcast with David Heinemeier Hansson that talks about his inspiration for RoR: http://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/1-0-5-homerun

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Martijn Heemels
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