Does Google use Ruby for application development?

Question

Does anyone know if Google uses Ruby for application development?

What are the general job prospects of Ruby compared to other languages like Perl or Python?

Answer 1

Does anyone know ig google uses Ruby for any application development?

Nope: they use C/C++/Java/Python/JavaScript (I'll go find a reference).

• Here's a post by Steve Yegge that makes it pretty clear they don't do Ruby.

Answer 2

Aaron's roughly right. We use C only for kernel work (and other maintenance on 3rd party stuff written in C) so I wouldn't count that as "application development", and Objective C for the very specific case of apps running client-side on Apple gear, etc.

Ruby is the embedded scripting language for Google Sketchup, see http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/gsrubyapi_examples.html -- that decision was made before Google acquired "@Last Software", Sketchup's makers.

Regarding Nishant's second question, in the wider job market, Ruby's kind of OK: still low absolute numbers but good growth, see http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jobs-and-trends and http://blog.timbunce.org/2008/02/12/comparative-language-job-trend-graphs/ -- the data are getting a bit long in the tooth, but it's really hard to do these assessments in a very up-to-the-minute fashion;-).

Answer 3

About job prospects: If you want to work for Google, it doesn't matter which of Python, Perl and Ruby you are fluent at: Python hackers don't have an advantage over Ruby hackers etc. when applying for a job as a Software Engineer. If you want to do Perl or Ruby programming a lot, Google is not the place for you.

To get an approximation about programming language popularity in job openings, try searching for programming languages on job offer sites. For example, http://www.itpinoy.com/search/ says Java is more popular than PHP, which is more popular than Ruby.

I've been programming Perl for several years before I started using Ruby. Again, a few years later, I started using Python, while still doing Perl and Ruby as well. In general, I tend to be more productive in Ruby and Python than in Perl, so I don't do much Perl anymore. I like Python because it feels like mature, well-designed and clean for me (compared to Ruby, which I feel a little bit hackier), and I like Ruby because I can do powerful operations by typing only a little (in contrast, Python doesn't support assignment in the middle of an expression, blocks, regexps as first-class objects, mutable strings; and the standard library of Python is not so versatile, e.g. the list and dict types have less methods than in Ruby).

So for someone new to Perl, Ruby and Python, I'd recommend spending a day with Ruby, one more day with Python, and choose which of these two to concentrate on learning.