There’s a piece of advice that floats around, apparently from the Pragmatic Programmer, which goes like this:

Learn One New Language Each Year

I made a good start at Ruby last year, but got derailed by new exciting things over in the .NET world. This year is definitely the one.

I’ve got two reasons:

First, I’m really excited about programming phone systems with Adhearsion.

Second, I’ve realized that all the cool kids over at Microsoft spent the last 3 years getting excited about Ruby. Not only are they developing their own Ruby runtime, but the dynamic features of C# 4.0 coming in VS2010 are obviously being designed to keep developers from jumping ship. We need to learn to think like Ruby coders to adapt to the new problems coming down the line.

One more thing…

Ruby is becoming a first-class citizen for Macintosh GUI application development. If you can write cross-platform libraries that work on the first-class frameworks on Windows, Linux, and the Mac…soon life will be nothing but champagne and swimsuit models!