Ruby has had huge impact on the way I write software. Whatever programming language or tools I'll use tomorrow, it will be dynamic.

Without Ruby on Rails there would have been no Groovy on Grails web application framework. But rubyist keep pushing limits, creating new kinds of database orm libraries like sequel and new web frameworks like sinatra.

Sinatra makes me write web applications that looks like haiku:

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'sinatra'

  get '/' do
     "This is a web application!"
  end

Sequel makes me write SQL queries that don't look like SQL:

  dataset = DB[:managers].where(:salary =>   5000..10000).order(:name, :department)

And haml makes html tagging look pretty:

  %h1 Markup
   %p
     .my_id Look ma, no end tags!

When you first got a taste for this style of programming, there's no going back. I don't now if I'll be coding Ruby, JRuby, JavaScript, Scala or Groovy tomorrow, but it will be done Ruby style.