WhyRuby?

It’s fun to work with

Lots of Ruby programmers started out in another language, and when you ask them why they prefer Ruby, they’ll often tell you that it’s just more fun to work with. Fun programming languages = happy programmers = better products = satisfied clients.

It favors convention over configuration

Let’s compare building a web app to building a house.

Everyone agrees that a house should have walls, ceilings, floors and a roof. Those are conventions that most homes follow. Every time a homebuilder starts work on a new house, she doesn’t need to define what a wall or a ceiling is, because everyone agrees on what those generally ought to look like.

Web applications also have conventions, and Ruby generally expects that your application will follow those conventions.

Now, that doesn’t mean you’re getting a cookie-cutter application when you use Ruby on Rails. Just as you can configure your home however you want—bay windows, full basement, marble floors—you can add custom features to your app.

But because Ruby favors convention, we have to spend less time defining dumb things like what a door looks like or what features ought to go into a kitchen. In the end, it saves us time and it saves you money.

It’s written for humans, not machines

Even programmers prefer to read stuff that’s written for humans. It’s just more fun. But it’s important for our clients, too. Ruby code is readable, which means next year, when someone is opening up a section of the code to make additions, it’ll be easy to pick it right up—whether it’s the person who originally wrote it or a new face on the project.

It’s the new standard

Big and small companies alike recognize that Ruby is a superior tool for building online software applications. Groupon.com , hulu.com , twitter.com and yellowpages.com are all written in Ruby, and so are thousands of other awesome web apps. You can find an ever-growing list here.