Tip to Programmers: Ruby on Rails, Why should I learn?

Last week from a meeting, I just learned another thing that is worth sharing to all the programmers out there. Being a programmer, you are always ask what languages are you familiar with, that is the usual question.

I graduated with only the basic Turbo C in mind, I have no idea how to structure a function or even create a recursive call. When I went out on the industry, I found out that the best thing you can learn from school is not what language you can do but how fast can you adapt to a certain language given a certain problem. In that case, my first programming language I learned in the industry is Ruby (specifically Ruby on Rails or ROR) wherein I was asked to create a site.

But since there are only few people who knows this, you might ask me: what is Ruby on Rails? and why on Earth should I study this?


Ruby as a Language

Ruby is actually an object oriented language that was developed in Japan by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto. It was influenced primarily by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, and Lisp. Being a C programmer, adjusting to ruby is not difficult since they are almost the same. According to Matz, "I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python. That's why I decided to design my own language".


Rails as a Framework

Rails on the other hand is a MVC (model-view-controller) framework. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is usually used for Ruby language in creating web applications. This framework can provide you a powerful web site, yet a clean looking and organize code that makes it easier to maintain.


Ruby + Rails = Nice Web Application Framework

Combining the two, RoR is an open source web application framework that, as I have said, uses MVC framework to organize programming. It also provides, an easy way of generating models, controllers or both with just one line of code. Plugins and gems, can easily be installed and use.

There are lots of sites right now that uses the said web application framework like Twitter, Yellow Pages, Shopify, AboutUs and many more. I even heard that Facebook uses it also at some parts of their site.

So why am I saying this?

So what's the deal with Ruby on Rails? Well here is the good news for all programmers, the fact that Philippines is not yet familiar with the said language and only a few people are knowledgeable about this as compared to all the PHP or Java programmers out there, means that that we are RARE! The demand in the industry of RoR programmers are higher since there are only few people who are experienced enough to understand it.

I speak from experience here, I often get invitation emails from different companies asking me for work. I also heard from clients how hard for them to seek programmers with knowledge on RoR. Knowing such things makes me more proud to be a RoR programmer for three years.

The best thing about RoR is that it is so easy to understand and play with. In my first attempt, I was able to create my own blogsite in less than 15 minutes. It isn't an ordinary blogsite, since it comes from scratch and you do all the coding. Yet even if it is easy enough to learn, you can't deny the fact that we are still rare here in our country and so the demand for us is greater than what the other programmers have.

Summary

So, think about it? Do you want to stick with PHP and join all the others or be unique with something that makes you different from other programmers? :)