Laugh now but one day we'll be in charge

Once upon a time there was a new language called Java. Everyone said it was too slow, too memory hungry, and generally not something a serious developer would use. Today that language rules the world.

I've spent the last years working with another language that is sometimes described in a similar way. I believe that Ruby is a great language, not only for writing web applications, but for distributed systems, high performance data processing and other things for which people would say that it’s too slow, too memory hungry and generally not something you should use.

The best part is that with JRuby we even have the opportunity to climb directly up to stand on the shoulders of giants, a shortcut through the decades that took Java from a toy to the lingua franca of software engineering.