Why does the Steem platform need ruby?

I started getting interested in ruby development in 2004. Back then, rails (Ruby on Rails) got a huge push in popularity, so it was on a lot of developer's radars.

From the standpoint of simplicity, rails allows developers to start working on a new site using just a couple commands. This was and still is a very attractive feature. Just type rails new idea and you can start working on a site called idea. Or rails new xyz where xyz is whatever you can think of.

A lot of people only know ruby because of rails. In fact, there's a fair number of people who only know a tiny fraction of ruby, but do great things in rails.

But if you want integration with other tools, or if you want to write tools for rails developers, you must know a lot about ruby and the related ecosystems.

So that's my hustle. I like to write tools to make it easier for other rubyists to integrate with Steem.

Is ruby a better language than, say, python? Actually, I don't think it comes down to that. For a lot of languages, it's usually just a matter of preference.

Preference is not usually the case for people who program in c/c. Often, something literally can't be done efficiently unless you use c/c. But for languages like ruby and python, if you're proficient (idiomatic) in both, you could use either.

However, there is something that I think ruby has that python is always trying to catch up on. It's not a language thing, it's a library thing.

The libraries offered by ruby aren't superior. That's not it either. I just think they're managed better in the ruby ecosystem than in python.

This is a very small edge that ruby has. If python library developers decided to get on the ball, they won't have a lot of work to do in order to make that edge disappear.

And maybe there is no real edge enjoyed by ruby. Maybe it's just my bias.

So it just boils down to opinion, on that front.

But why does the Steem platform need Ruby?

Simple answer: Ruby will lead to even more applications staked by STEEM Power.

I don't see PHP developers doing this, even though PHP is more popular than ruby (by number of job offers). If you've got an idea to stake, PHP just isn't the most direct route.

We've already got great coverage on Javascript, Python, and even Java to some extent. Ruby is the next in line, in terms of popularity by pull requests.

As a popular programming language, I think ruby really will help onboard even more developers to stake their applications and grow the platform.