Response to Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language

This article feels like someone is defending their language. And that doesn’t bother me, but I don’t value that.

What I want is a dispassionate discussion of how different language features impact code quality, and I think you can only find that in more abstract discussions. The kind that turns people off with its monads.

As a Python enthusiast for 20 years, just ignore and enjoy.

Ruby is a joy to program in. I started exploring it after using Haskell and Smalltalk and was pleasantly surprised when the language would do things like both of them.

I indeed really liked Ruby because of it's expresiveness, it being totally OO, the lovely readable and writeable syntax.

But yeah, that was 20 years ago. These days I find Kotlin to be the perfect fit for my projects, because of the static typing and its ergonomic syntax. I just don't feel confident about Ruby projects when they start growing. But, I still love the language, although mostly for small things.

Ruby’s biggest flaw is that it insists humans matter. Some people hate that.

Well said.

> Culture doesn’t reliably reward the serious. Neither does business. It rewards the resonant. The clear. The human. The work that connects.

Culture maybe, but business rewards what make business going on. Only that and Ruby proved that it can make businesses start and keep them going on. The few ones that exceed the capabilities of the runtime had to pivot to something else, in part or completely, but would we had a Twitter if they started coding in pick-your-favorite-serious-language? Maybe a competitor would have overrun them. We'll never know.

What I know for sure is that Ruby has been paying my bills for nearly 20 years. That's more than any other language I used, serious or not serious. It worked for me.

I read this whoel article and I still do not understand what criteria make a programming language serious. Obviously it's very different from Python but I don't understand "serious" or "non-serious" as a way to describe this.

Ruby is a little silly, but given its pedigree of generational internet projects, Rails is indisputably a serious framework.

It’s as serious as you want/need it to be.

> Ruby attracts a particular kind of person. Not better. Not smarter. Just… different. People who care how code feels to write and read. People who see programming as a craft that can be expressive. People who understand that most of our careers are spent living inside someone else’s decisions, so joy isn’t a luxury… it’s the only way this work stays humane.

The idea that caring about how your programs feel to write or read is somehow “different” seems weird to me. I don’t write Ruby so maybe I just don’t appreciate this difference.

But I mean, I write fun-to-write, silly little experiments in Octave, Fortran, and Python… I don’t know if anyone would enjoy reading them, but I don’t really see how a language could prevent you from finding joy in programming (other than Java of course /s).

Ruby is a fine language that puts humans over machine.

however the success of rails was also its biggest albatross. Ruby though fine for system tasks (such as system automation etc, chef existed yeah - but we haven't seen new gen tools built after) - people forgot it could do those.

the other is failure of certain sjws to separate say dhh the programmer vs the person. & not being aware to how money (velocity & gravity) move the world e.g shopify involvement in the ruby ecosystem.

failure to understand that beginners are the lifeblood of an ecosystem - till this date don't know if ruby can be effectively used on windows. most people have windows machines not mac's or linux boxes.

it didn't fail cz it was too slow (its fast enough)