I'll have to pick up a copy of this "Ruby Under a Microscope" book when the new version comes out. I've always liked Ruby, I just haven't had much chance to use it.
This sounds like Microsoft when they moved from VB6 to VB.Net. At least they have a good thing going with C# though.
VB6 was quite an interesting beast. You could do basically everything that you could do in languages like C/C++, but in most cases, you could churn out code quicker. This even extended to DirectX/Direct3D! For Web pages? ASP Classic.
The tl;dr is that I really wish that ease of development were prioritized along with everything else. One of the reasons I like Ruby is the elegance of the language and ease of using it.
Note that I've been using it since the mid 2000s or so, but not exclusively (both it and VB6 defined my career, however). C# is my second most favorite.
If Ruby had the GUI design tools VB6 had, it would be interesting to look at the popularity stats
Anyway, I'm rambling, so there is that. ;)
> You could do basically everything that you could do in languages like C/C++
As long as there is some form of memory access, any language can do basically everything that one can do in C/C++, but this doesn't make much sense.
No VB6 had really easy COM integration which let you tap into a lot of Windows system components. The same code in C++ often required hundreds of lines of scaffolding, and I'm not exaggerating