I'm not really sure what first got me interested in Ruby. Probably just reading about Ruby on Rails somewhere. I know I mentioned it here.
What I do know its that I Love Ruby. It's great. It rocks my world.
Not being a programmer has certain advantages when it comes to programming. It means all languages are the same to me in that I just need to know that languages way of inputting and outputting, setting variables and doing some loops. It means I don't know how these things should be done. I don't know what is good or bad in a language. I don't really know or care what OOP is. I just know whats easy to use. And ruby is really easy to use (How's if FileTest.exists?(filepath_pt) for easy, you can almost guess the commands). Plus incredibly fun.
I've managed to write such incredibly beautiful programs as this:
OK it looks rubbish, but it works and it was very easy to do. Since only windows users here are likely to use it the looks aren't important - they are used to rubbish GUIs. RubyTk is very easy to use and has the benefit of being completely cross platform so I can easily do stuff at home as well.
I understand there are big arguements for and against certain languages, but I think this guy understands why Ruby is successful and taking off. It's because it's cool. I gather from reading that, as an engineer I should probably be using Python (although I say Octave for pure maths), but I'm not the typical grey engineer (hence all my difficulties with engineering) so I find it amusing that ended up using Ruby without knowing any of that.
I'm glad I've managed to do something fun at work, that also has a legit use (searching millions and millions of lines of Ansys files). If only I could do that every day.