A couple of years ago I was involved in starting a software development project that aimed to bring a focus of usability, good user experience and ‘feel good’ graphic design to open source music creation software. We were discussing potential platforms one day, and my boss suddenly said to me “we should use Ruby”! I was a little taken aback by this. I had been aware of Ruby as a scripting frontend for the Gnome desktop environment, but not as a serious desktop application development language. So why did he suggest it? Well, if you look around at software on the web that has great UI and UX, and great look and feel, Ruby is never far away. In short, people who understand and appreciate great design are attracted to Ruby, and these people employ great designers.
The Ruby official site is a case in point. It has a nice succinct paragraph telling you what the language is about, set against a simple code example, easy and prominent links to download and get started and a cuddly look ‘n’ feel that makes you want to dive in and get coding. Following the “Success Stories” link, we see that Ruby is used by ‘A List Apart’ and 37Signals; notable gurus of web design and purveyors of good taste.
The Python home page by comparison looks cluttered, and has a clunky opening paragraph. The look ‘n’ feel is clinical and lifeless with no space for the content to ‘breath’. Python’s ‘Success stories’ section is harder to find and more verbose and poorly presented. In short, from the respective websites alone, Python comes across as a less-appealing, less-sexy language than Ruby.
Compare also Ruby on Rails (arguably Ruby’s flagship success story) to other web development frameworks in terms of their marketing:
- Ruby on Rails (Ruby)
- Django (Python)
- CakePHP (PHP)
- Catalyst (Perl)
For me the Rails site just gets it right: it’s clear, concise, elegant and exciting. In terms of design, the other frameworks don’t come close.
So… I can see why someone who wants to make a piece of software with focus on usability and great design, might choose Ruby: it has a community of like-minded people around it, all pushing out nicely designed web apps. This isn’t about band-wagon jumping or being a ‘victim’ of marketing or hype, it’s about acknowledging that talent converges around great design. Python, Lua et al, might be well designed languages, they may well be more powerful, more readable or more flexible than Ruby, but if they can’t convey this effectively through their web presence, they won’t attract developers who value great design.
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