OS X 10.5 Leopard will contain Ruby on Rails. This is great news.

First, a little disclaimer. I don’t particularly like Ruby and I don’t like Rails. I know a lot of people really like Ruby and good for them. It has a lot of good ideas that I’ve never bothered to learn well enough to actually use the language. Furthermore, I never use it. I used to be a scripting language whore. I learned whatever I came across. Now I just use three. I mostly use Applescript because it does everything I want and, with TextWrangler’s scripting dictionary, it does all the text stuff I need. I also use perl from time to time when I don’t want to mess with TW. Finally, I use Lua. It’s nice because it works a lot like C and I know C. It just offers just enough to be frustrating if I want to do anything complicated.

I don’t like Rails simply because I don’t like another process running all the time on my computer. If it worked as a simple framework and not as a constantly running process, I’d be fine with it. I guess that’s not how it was designed and it wouldn’t work as well if it were different. But that’s my only real beef with Rails.

However, Ruby on Rails standard in Leopard is great even if I’ll never use it. See, RoR is very popular for web developers nowadays. Lots of these people use OS X (and TextMate). Making it standard in Leopard will make OS X the de facto standard computing requirement for budding RoR developers. Need everything in a box? Get a Mac. Apple is positioning the Mac platform as a force in the future of web development. Wonderful!