metaclass

Martin Fowler, chief scientist at ThoughtWorks, author, and advocate for agile practices has written a report and given a talk on ThoughtWorks’ experience with using Ruby in their consultancy.

You can read the report or watch the video.

Here is the major conclusion of the report:

All of these questions sum up into the key question for us: is Ruby (and Rails) a viable platform for us and our clients. The answer thus far is a resounding “yes”. It offers palpable gains in productivity, allowing us to be more responsive and produce better software, more quickly for our clients. This isn’t to say it’s the right choice for all situations. Choosing a development platform is never a simple choice, particularly since it usually is more of a social choice than a technological choice. But the headline conclusion is that Ruby is a choice that’s worth considering, worthy enough for us to want to keep this tool in our toolkit. [emphasis added]

The Register reports that a survey conducted by Evans Data shows that in North America, usage of Ruby by developers is up by 40% from one year ago. Furthermore, based on what developers expect to be using in the next year, we should see a 43% increase in Ruby over the next twelve months.