Ruby is the dynamic, object-oriented language designed for programmer happiness — an explicit goal of Yukihiro Matsumoto when he created it in 1995. The language stayed niche through the 2000s until Ruby on Rails made it the default choice for early-stage web startups in the 2010-2015 window.
Ruby's production presence is concentrated in Rails apps that scaled past a hundred engineers (Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb originally, Stripe's API gateway). The language itself is enjoyable to write and the meta-programming features remain unmatched, but for green-field web work in 2026 most teams pick Node.js, Go, or Python over Ruby. The courses still on offer mostly target Rails maintenance and the established Ruby fleet.
