Got ruby (and the rails) installed and working and I've been doing my typical computer dialect quick learn. There was a language before that claimed to do things in less lines of code than what we were using before. It was called PERL. I don't use PERL anymore unless I have to. It is one of the most horrid language specifications I've ever seen.

Ruby looks pretty nice, but it's a bit obtuse. If you're a C or PHP or whatever programmer, you can't exactly read it without a reference nearby. You can read it, but there are a lot of subtle punctuations. I hate subtle punctuations. Yes, they make for a more powerful language, but they also make for subtle bugs. For instance,
  scaffold :event
is a valid statement, but
  scaffold : event
is not.You also apparantly cannot have a database table named 'date' because creating a 'date' class to access it will throw all kinds of errors. It collides with the existing date class which manipulates date information. Of course I have an existing database called 'date' that I cannot use with Ruby||Rails because of this. Sigh. I hate database conversions. I'll have to also change the other application which is using the date database. I made all of these discoveries within ten minutes of getting ruby working.

Looks like it's a wonderful language for discovery of how subtle things affect how the program runs. Perl was likewise a wonderful language for discovery. That's why I don't use it anymore.

We'll see. I use languages that make my work easier. The claim is that Ruby makes my work easier. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. But my initial impression is that it's destined to be a flash in the pan like java. Remember when everybody was programming in java? Where are they today?

It also wouldn't take much to put a database and view abstraction layer on PHP. Hint, hint.