I have not written any Ruby code in several months

I really have not written or looked at any Ruby programs since late last year.

I feel a little uneasy with that because it is such a potent language. I am sure I do not want to get rusty at it, nor stall my on-going growth at using the language.

Any experienced, mature programmer should have Ruby and/or Python - or something like them - on their desktops.

No one programming language does all jobs well. Most programming languages have a set of things they do very well - better than most other languages can.

My gut instincts - call it intuition - tell me that Ruby is going to turn a new page and surge in popularity/mass-awareness next year sometime. I think 2008 is going to be the year that Ruby is recognized as a major hit.

I rather suspect that when that happens, the story will come out that 2006 and 2007 is when a lot of amazing Ruby programs got quietly deployed and took root.

Sun brings forth a new Ruby IDE from NetBeans

Here is a pretty cool screenshot of a new Ruby IDE:

http://blogs.sun.com/tor/resource/ruby-editing.png

The post that describes what the picture means - which is just what it looks like it means - is here:

http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/netbeans_and_ruby_is_true

Sun is making huge strides in adding Ruby support to NetBeans, in part, because they hired the JRuby (Ruby in Java) developers a few months ago.

The Tor Norby weblog post entitled Welcome JRuby for details.