Ruby Versus JavaScript

The JavaScript language and Ruby are very similar.

• You might say JavaScript is very much like Ruby Lite, but with the syntax of Java.
• Or, you might say Ruby is very much like JavaScript 3.0, but without all the punctuation.

Here's some of what JavaScript can't do, compared to Ruby...

• Natural looking attribute getters and setters, like for @comment.post = @post
• Magic method_missing, to allow for dynamically, on-demand-generated findByFooAndBlah() runtime methods.
• Concise code blocks. Instead, you got to pass around closures.
• See ruby.js (google for it), which attempts to make JavaScript behave like Ruby.
• Embedded text
• ...and probably much much more

On the other hand, JavaScript has a few things going for it, too.

• It's widely deployed, in every browser, making eval() available to the world.
• JavaScript is inherently View Sourcable.
• It's runnable on a server, too -- with the Rhino Java implementation of JavaScript.
• Sadly, though, not at TextDrive, which doesn't support Rhino/Java.
• It's got more bookshelf real estate right now than Ruby.
• So it's easy for you to learn JavaScript in 21 days!
• More folks have (blindly) copy-&-pasted snippets of JavaScript than snippets of Ruby.
• Brendan beats Matz > 9 to 1 in Google Smackdown.
• But, some folks would say, like with comparing lines of code measurements, that it does not matter much.
• And, most importantly, this is the secret marketing weapon: it's got ''Java'' as part of its name.

Although I've only picked up Ruby for 2 months now and I'd rather now program in Ruby if I could, having JavaScript be the world most widely deployed scripting language is not a terrible situation. After all, it has eval(), closures, and prototypes. It could have been worse (and we all know worse is better). -- SteveYen