I’m back from OSCON 2005, and it was definitely a watershed event for Ruby. It was so great to be there, and to be a part of it. Ruby had a major presence every day of the conference.

Monday, both tutorials—Dave Thomas’ intro to Ruby, and David Heinemeier Hansson’s intro to Rails—were in the large tutorial room, and were packed. At Tuesday evening’s extravaganza, David won the best hacker award, and Ruby got several nods in Damian Conway’s unbelievably entertaining talk. Wednesday morning during the keynote, Tim O’Reilly discussed Ruby’s small but growing share of the programming language book market, and speculated that Ruby might be “the Perl of Web 2.0.”

David led off an eventful Thursday with a keynote on “The Secrets of Rails.” All of Thursday’s Ruby talks were standing-room only, and for three of them people were turned away because there was no place for them. Why’s multimedia extravaganza was moved to a larger and more suitable room (thanks to Nat Torkington and the O’Reilly conference staff) and turned into the most memorable event of any conference I’ve ever seen.

Finally, Danny O’Brien’s Friday “To Evil” keynote topped it all off, hilariously citing Ruby as a notable exception to Gandhi’s famous quotation. Why? Because it went directly from “they ignore you” to “you win” in about three weeks.

Jokes aside, this week alone shows that Ruby has arrived.