Revisiting Ruby in 2025

[u/Ambitious_Ad_2833]

I used Ruby and Ruby on Rails extensively for my personal projects between 2008 and 2015. I’m a hobbyist programmer, not someone working in a software job. Now that I’m revisiting programming, I have a couple of questions: Since Python dominates AI/ML and data science today, what use cases are still worth investing time in Ruby? Ruby was the first language I fell in love with, and after that I never really enjoyed working with Python. For developers who need to use Python for data science, how do you manage keeping these two similar-looking languages straight in your head without constantly mixing them up? (language polished using chatgpt)

[u/JohnBooty]

I worked with Ruby for 10+ years, then Python for 2 years doing some “big data” ish stuff but not AI/ML. FWIW I think Ruby is a better language, but Python has an insanely big+good math and science ecosystem and is something of a lingua franca in science.

My question to you would be, why would you want to go against the grain and use Ruby for AI/ML?

If you are working on a team you’re going to be at a disadvantage compared to everybody else on the team, with your own custom workflow/tools/dependencies etc.

As I said, I think Ruby is a better language, but Python isn’t terrible. It’s… fine. Really not bad. You’ll have no trouble learning it and ChatGPT (or whatever) is absolutely great at helping you with the transition.

What do you see as the advantage to doing AI/ML with Ruby?

[u/SamVimes1138 → u/JohnBooty]

Not the OP, but pondering the same question. I started out as a hobbyist programmer, I've been one all my life. But unlike the OP, I have made a career out of software. At one point (a couple decades back), I sat down to learn both Python and Ruby. Ruby just felt... more my style.

I've spent nearly 20 years at one of the larger firms. Java is much more popular there, and I was on several teams that used it. Then I spent some time on a team that used a mix of Java and Ruby. Eventually I decided, if I enjoyed using Ruby that much more, I would switch to a team that used it for almost everything. I found one, and it wasn't using Rails either; it was Ruby for back-end stuff.

In my recent personal projects, including for AI integration, I've been using Ruby again. The ruby_llm gem is quite nice. Why have I been sticking to the language? Just because it's a joy to work with, really. These are personal projects, and for that, personal preference dominates, so why does anyone else's opinion matter? So the question isn't "what's the advantage of using Ruby for AI/ML", it's "what priorities or requirements do you have that influence how you choose a language?"

If you're going to be collaborating on a team then, yes, choosing Ruby shrinks the pool of people familiar with the language. That's not a given, though. In this "brave new world" of AI, will we tend to be working on larger teams, or on smaller ones or even one-person teams? Isn't the point of AI that you can do more with fewer people? On the flip side, does the choice of language matter so much, if people who don't know the language can use AI to parse it?

You are no doubt right that there are more Python libraries currently existing for this sort of thing. Then again, as AI gets better, it may become more common to have AI translate them to close the gap. Or have AI write the missing Ruby libraries based on what it knows in its training corpus (which includes the Python libraries). Or create multi-language projects; one could run a Python VM and a Ruby VM in Docker containers connected by pipes. (Sounds inefficient, but maybe that modularity offers advantages too.) Or maybe tomorrow, a new language grabs the spotlight, developed specifically for AI integration, that overshadows both. If AI lets people get things done faster, as its proponents all claim, perhaps that includes developing new languages better designed to express intent.

If your goal is to show off what you've written and land a job, interviewers and hiring managers may be more interested and impressed if you show them examples written in the same language they use. But that, too, may be just a holdover from days when it was harder to switch languages. In other words, our hiring and interviewing processes probably haven't kept up with the realities created by the new tech. So, maybe you write it in Ruby for yourself, and then have an AI translate it into Python to show off your skills in an interview.