There’s a piece of advice that floats around,apparently from the PragmaticProgrammer, which goes like this:

Learn One New Language Each Year

I made a good start at Ruby last year, but got derailed by new exciting things overin the .NET world. This year is definitely the one.

I’ve got two reasons:

First, I’m really excited about programming phone systems with Adhearsion.

Second, I’ve realized that all the cool kids over at Microsoft spent the last 3 yearsgetting excited about Ruby. Not only are they developing their own Ruby runtime, butthe dynamicfeatures of C# 4.0 coming in VS2010 are obviously being designed to keep developersfrom jumping ship. We need to learn to think like Ruby coders toadapt to the new problems coming down the line.

One more thing…

Ruby is becoming a first-class citizen for Macintosh GUI application development.If you can write cross-platform libraries that work on the first-class frameworkson Windows, Linux, and the Mac…soon life will be nothing but champagne and swimsuitmodels!