You may be wondering why Ruby is so popular. It is a beautiful and artistic language, according to its fans. They also say it's practical and useful. Ruby has attracted devoted coders around the world since its 1995 release. Ruby was widely accepted in 2006. Active user groups were formed in major cities around the globe and Ruby-related conferences were full to capacity. Ruby-Talk, the main mailing list for discussion about the Ruby language, saw an average of 200 messages per daily in 2006. As the community has grown, the number of messages per day on Ruby-Talk has fallen. Ruby ranks among the top 10 in most indices that measure popularity and growth of programming languages around the world (such as TIOBE index). The popularity of Ruby on Rails, especially the Ruby on Rails web framework, is responsible for a large part of this growth.