Why Choose Ruby Development for Your Next Project

If you are considering Ruby development for your backend tech stack, you want to be aware of advantages and disadvantages before you start contacting teams. Ruby is a universal language, but it’s not the perfect fit for any project. So, let’s see its weak and strong points - and talk about ways of leveraging Ruby’s enormous potential. 

Main Ruby advantages:

• Reduces development effort.

• Familiar to many programmers

• Can reduce number of development man-hours

With Ruby, you can reduce the development effort, shorten the time to release an app, or provide a system at a lower price.

This is because Ruby is less descriptive and simpler to write than other languages. Less writing simply means less typing, and it's easier to know where to start when it comes time to revise later.

Also, Ruby has a framework called Ruby on Rails, which provides everything you need for development so you can reduce the amount of work you need to do.

As you can see, the ability to reduce the number of development man-hours is a big advantage, and Ruby is especially popular in venture companies with a small number of people.

Influence of Other Languages

Ruby also has the advantage of being familiar to programmers who have already learned other languages — in particular, Perl. 

This is because Ruby is characterized by the fact that you can write it in many different ways and it does not matter if you write it in your own way. For example, Ruby can be written without the semicolon, "", and so on.

Ruby can be written in many different ways, it is easy to become familiar with many programmers.

Disadvantages of Ruby Development

Ruby is not a universal language and there are many situations where you should not use Ruby.

The Disadvantages of Ruby

• Its execution speed is slow

• Other people's code is hard to read

• Slow execution speed

Execution Speed

Ruby is slow to execute, taking longer than other languages to perform the same operation.

This is because Ruby is an "interpreter language," which translates a program line by line into a machine-readable language and then executes it. On the other hand, C, for example, is called a "compiling language" and translates a program into machine-readable form all at once and then executes it, so it is faster.

If the execution speed is slow, for example, it may not be suitable for processing machine learning, which requires complex calculations. Thus, there are certain areas in which Ruby is unsuitable for development because of its slow execution speed.

It's Hard to Read Other People's Code

Ruby also has the disadvantage that other people's code is difficult to read, because Ruby can be written in different ways by different people.

I mentioned earlier that the advantage of Ruby is that it can be written in a variety of ways, making it accessible to many programmers.

For example, if a senior programmer writes code in a completely different way than you, it may take you longer to read the code if you have to take it over. In this case, the advantage of Ruby's less development effort will be of little value.

To solve this disadvantage, many companies set up internal writing rules in order to standardize the way they write code, but there are sometimes conflicts when deciding on the rules.

Since Ruby can be written in different ways by different people, it is difficult to read other people's code, and this is a disadvantage, especially in large companies.

Conclusion

So, Ruby is great for MVP development and small and medium businesses. It’s fast, easy to write, and easy to learn. It’s not a typical choice for enterprise development - because the execution is not robust enough and the lack of static typing is a problem in a collaborative environment. However, for small teams and time-constrained projects, Ruby is perhaps the most cost-efficient choice.