Question

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?

Answer 1

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.