Ruby Solved My Problem
6 comments
·November 7, 2025adverbly
If you ignore performance and mathematical elegance and safety and just look at how much a language lets you get away with from a productivity standpoint, I think Ruby is a pretty standout winner and nobody else even comes close really...
Very clear APIs and syntax and tons of raw metaprogramming powers(with the possible exception of blocks which can be weird because they aren't quite functions).
You can argue it sacrifices too much of the other things to deliver on these things, but it's hard to argue against it doing well at what it optimizes for!
iagooar
Ruby has a lot of these hidden gems (pun intended).
I wouldn't be as much in love with programming, if it wasn't for Ruby. And although I use many other programming languages these days, Ruby will forever have a special place in my heart.
matltc
Agreed. Was looking around for STL files so I could print a ruby and put it on my desk.
Glad to see it's getting love on here recently.
c-hendricks
title is actually "Ruby already solved my problem"
throwaway81523
Thanks, that helped. My unspoken question when I saw the title was "does that mean you now have two problems?".
> it’s built into Ruby!
Nitpick: technically `Gem::Version` is part of `rubygems`, and while rubygems is (typically) packaged with Ruby, it's actually entirely optional, so much so that `rubygems` actually monkeypatches† Ruby core's `Kernel` (notably `require`) to inject gem functionality.
Back in 1.8 days, you even had to manually require `rubygems`!
† https://github.com/ruby/rubygems/tree/4e4d2b32353c8ded870c14...