I am a junior studying computer science and the University of Michigan. For the last month I’ve been trying to learn ruby, and have been making progress. I went on an interview yesterday with a startup company specializing in multimedia online, and I mentioned ruby. The interviewer went on a whole tangent about why ruby wasn’t useful and how its just popular because of marketing. So my question is, is ruby worth learning? and what are the majore advantages of it versus php (what the interviewer considered “useful”?

Don’t trust anyone who says learning a language is useless. Different languages expose different features and help you think in different ways about programming. I started with Javascript and it was only until I started learning Ruby that I grasped OOP in Javascript (because it’s so obfuscated). Javascript allows for a more functional programming with async events and concurrency.

Unfortunately I don’t have any experience beyond that, but people often comment on the value of learning Lisp—not because of its practicality but because it changes the way you think about code.

To be honest with you, a company specializing in ‘multimedia online’ sounds like something out of the 90’s. I’m sure other companies would appreciate your eagerness in learning beyond what they teach at school.

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