Ruby is not the universal panacea for programmers' problems. There
will always be times when you'll need a particular language: the
environment may dictate it, you may have special libraries you need,
performance concerns, or simply an issue with training. We haven't
given up languages such as Java and C++ entirely (although there are
times when we wish we could).
However, Ruby is probably more applicable than you might think. It is
easy to extend, both from within the language and by linking in
third-party libraries. It is portable across a number of
platforms. It's relatively lightweight and consumes only modest
system resources. And it's easy to learn; we've known people who've
put Ruby code into production systems within a day of picking up
drafts of this book. We've used Ruby to implement parts of an X11 window
manager, a task that's normally considered severe C coding. Ruby
excelled, and helped us write code in hours that would otherwise have
taken days.
Once you get comfortable with Ruby, we think you'll keep coming back
to it as your language of choice.
