The history of programming languages is depressing. Generally worse is better. Socio-economic factors dominate. But there seems to be one giant exception: Ruby & Rails. I haven’t studied them deeply, but they look like really good work that has succeeded on its merits. Ruby is a tastefully designed language with a coherent philosophy of making programming easy and fun. Rails righteously smites the bloated complexity of the Big Java web frameworks. Gotta love it. So how did it win? This undermines my entire cynical world view. Can anyone explain how it went down?
Update: note the obstacles. Ruby had dubious performance. It was developed in Japan, doc translation from Japanese was incomplete and laggy, the dev lists were largely in Japanese. Scripting languages were not considered suitable for large-scale applications. Ruby was not used for a lot of server-side programming. Rails took away many checklist features that people thought they needed. People had already built cool web frameworks in LISP and Smalltalk without anyone much caring. What fortuitous combination of factors allowed Ruby&Rails to succeed? How important was the DHH cult of personality? I’m guessing a lot.