[jghn]

I think you're really overselling the difficulty of switching languages at that time, it wasn't even that big of a deal pre-google, much less pre-SO.

That said, SO was indeed a complete game changer in terms of the rapidity with which one could get solid information.

[mattmanser]

There were a lot less tutorials, they tended to be for Linux/Mac, it was rare to find windows installers, some python libraries didn't work at all on windows without some seriously complicated compiler knowledge.

It might have been easy to go php > ruby, but C# > ruby meant massive amounts of pain or complety changing your environments. While my company at the time had VMs, they were all windows and it wasn't a case of simply spinning up an EC2 to play. The pain of leaving a MS stack was massive.

I'm using ruby/python a bit interchangeably as I was.playing with both, but even things like gem took a load of effot compared to now. Like a couple of days of fiddling doing nothing interesting, not programming but constantly hitting errors or tutorials not working as you'd got a step earlier in the chain slightly wrong. It was a huge barrier to entry.

The worst tutorials claimed to be for both windows and linux, but would link to an out of date windows installer and all the command line commands would be for linux. I once made the mistake of thinking I'd write little maintenance scripts in Python instead of VB, it was great until I tried to connect to a MSSQL environment, ended up in a world of pain.

Last time I span up node.js on a new windows computer it took me like 10 minutes. Everything has changed.

[jghn]

I can't speak to anything regarding Windows dev here as I haven't done any of that since the mid-90s, and even then it was just a short project.

That said, I see what you're getting at now and it isn't what I thought you were talking about previously. It looks like what you're talking about is it taking a few days (or so) to get a working environment up and running vs. nearly instantaneous now? If so, fair enough I totally agree.

I thought you were talking more about the more nuts & bolts parts, like it taking a few weeks to come up to speed on Python (for instance) instead of several months. I've always felt that claims of it being difficult to change languages or other type things (e.g. changing from Oracle to MySQL) were radically overblown, and these days w/ sites like SO it's pretty much trivial.

[zamalek]

The main issue with Ruby is now historical. When I tried to pick it up a few years back (around the time SO was probably being written) it could be somewhat hostile to Windows users. Gems/what-have-you assuming the existence of the GNU compiler chain and assuming that they were running on a unix.

These days the landscape is a lot better, especially when it comes to Ruby.

[collyw]

I think languages have converged a lot, and when one language has a killer feature, then others try to copy it. CPAN was the big thing in Perl years ago, but Ruby has GEMS (maybe it always did) Python has Pip. Java loops used to need an iterator when I used it years ago, now they don't it is even getting functional features these days.