Ruby may have faded from the headlines, but its fingerprints are everywhere.

When Matz designed Ruby, he prioritised something unusual — developer happiness. Not performance. Not corporate adoption. Joy. That philosophy attracted a particular kind of builder: expressive, pragmatic, willing to experiment.

And when those builders hit Ruby’s limits, they didn’t complain. They created.

The diaspora is remarkable. Ryan Dahl learned web development on Rails before creating Node.js. TJ Holowaychuk spent years writing Sinatra apps before building Express.js — explicitly calling it “a Sinatra-inspired server.” Armin Ronacher’s Flask was a direct Sinatra port for Python.

José Valim served on the Rails Core Team before creating Elixir. Chris McCord nearly worked at 37signals before building Phoenix. Taylor Otwell modelled Laravel’s ORM on ActiveRecord and its routing on Sinatra.

Yehuda Katz created Bundler’s revolutionary lockfile pattern — then co-designed Cargo for Rust using the same principles. Every modern package manager follows his blueprint.

Even Homebrew was written in Ruby. So were Chef and Puppet, the tools that pioneered infrastructure as code.

The pattern repeats across testing, too. RSpec’s describe/it syntax became Jasmine, Mocha, and Jest. Cucumber’s Given/When/Then spread to SpecFlow, Behave, and JBehave.

What made Ruby’s community so generative? Strong conventions that reduced cognitive load. A welcoming culture that mentored newcomers. An expressive syntax that inspired better APIs everywhere.

These principles didn’t disappear when developers moved on — they carried them into every new project.

Timeline

• RSpec (2005): Behaviour-driven testing that spawned Jasmine, Mocha, and Jest
• Puppet (2005): Infrastructure as code, written entirely in Ruby
• Sass (2006): CSS preprocessor that revolutionised stylesheets
• Sinatra (2007): Micro-framework that inspired Flask, Express, Laravel routing
• Node.js (2009): Ryan Dahl learned web development on Rails before building it
• CoffeeScript (2009): Ruby-inspired syntax for JavaScript, compiler written in Ruby
• Chef (2009): Configuration management with Ruby DSL recipes
• Homebrew (2009): macOS package manager, written in Ruby
• Flask (2010): Python micro-framework, direct Sinatra port
• Express.js (2010): TJ Holowaychuk’s “Sinatra-inspired server” for Node
• Bundler (2010): Lockfile pattern now used by npm, Cargo, Yarn, Composer
• Elixir (2011): José Valim brought Ruby’s syntax to the Erlang VM
• Laravel (2011): Rails philosophy and ActiveRecord patterns for PHP
• Crystal (2011): Ruby syntax compiled to native code
• Phoenix (2014): Rails-inspired framework for Elixir with real-time channels
• Cargo (2014): Rust’s package manager, co-designed by Bundler’s creator

Every time you use a lockfile, spin up an Express server, write a describe block, or install something with Homebrew, you’re benefiting from innovations that trace back to a community that believed programming should be a joy.

That’s a legacy worth recognising.