Disclaimer: Not a rubyist, don't know anything beyond basic Ruby.

I think Ruby got a big boost from Rails a couple of years ago, but nowadays there are frameworks like it in almost every other language. Ruby is not particularly fast and the available libraries lack a lot in direct comparison with Python. I personally just don't see the point of Ruby. And in terms of "big bucks", Java is (still) very strong in corporate, C++ as well, and more startup-y ventures often use Python, or one of the "hip" languages, node.js, Lisp, Clojure, stuff like that. But money is in pretty much any language. Decide what you want to do first and choose the best language for the job then.

The "big bucks" are in writing something small that takes off huge. That is, joining or starting a new company that hits the big time. This can be done in any language, but Ruby/Rails was and arguably still is one of the more popular ones. There are also PHP and Python, which have their own frameworks that can make it easy to get a web site or service up and running.

That said, there are also big bucks in "enterprise" development, where Java and C# are the main languages in use. So, for job safety and pretty decent salaries, those are pretty strong.

The problem is... you are best off not focusing on where things are now, but trying to get a handle on where they will be. The problem is that predicting that is and always has been pretty tough. So, the smart money says, get some experience with as many different programming paradigms as possible. That is, learn procedural, object-oriented, functional, and whatever else you can.

Then, when the time comes, you can pick whatever holds the "big bucks" title at the time, pick it up quickly, and get in the rat race with the rest of us.

ruby is a great language for you to pick up. In ruby everything is an object.

The most important thing is to learn to program with any language. It's best to pick up any language that has the most straight forward way to learn so that you may adhere to a steady curriculum. While it is time consuming to learn to program, it takes much less time to learn a new language once you understand how to program in any given language.

I always liked ruby, but it really isn't like any other language. If I had to compare it to one, it would maybe be closest to javascript? It really isn't, but that is all I can think of at the moment.

C++ is the more important one here, it will teach you the basics that are extremely important and will lead you into other OO languages (with a deep understanding of objects).

The big bucks are in corporate code, which is C++, Java, and now C# (more so the latter 2). If you know (as in understand) C++, then the other languages you can more or less just pick up on as you go.

My advice would be to concentrate on understanding C++ so that you won't struggle when trying to pick up other languages. Your CS courses will likely be a lot of theory, but it is important. There will be mundane C++ homework, but it will be important. They are trying to teach you not just how to be a developer, but a good one (at my uni anyway).

That being said, ruby is a fun language to play around with, and is pretty powerful with rails.

Ruby has a very nice syntax, it's so much nicer than the verbosity of Java (although to be fair, Java 8 is a step in the right direction). I think most people use Ruby on the Rails as a web framework, but it can be used just for scripting.

I decided to start (slowly) learning Ruby because there's a relatively large community, it has a very concise syntax, and the unit testing support is supposed to be really good for Rails. I'm sure it has its disadvantages but I haven't spent enough time to find them.