Apr8
While I don’t agree with the central premise, I think this exploration of Ruby’s flaws is mosly fair and accurate. Individual developers may decide whether it’s worth it to use Ruby in spite of these problems. But the claims made in this section are plainly ridiculous. As ridiculous as asserting, with a straight face, that OpenOffice would be as good as its Microsoft colleague if it simply adopted an animated paper clip.
April 8th, 2008 at 11:31 am (Quote ↓)
I don’t understand how a seemingly intelligent person could honestly believe that going from “not knowing Ruby at all” to being able to write an in-depth analysis of Ruby after a mere two weeks of usage.
It doesn’t matter how much of a badass you are, it will take time to learn the language. If you judge it prematurely like this guy has done, then you are surely going to be basing your opinion on some common misconceptions.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:57 pm (Quote ↓)
In fairness, he does divide his critique into three sections, and I agree with two of them. Lack of Unicode support (in the context of the 1.9/2.0 uncertainty) and lack of documentation are my two biggest gripes.
That third section, though, is a mixed bag. He nitpicks some of Ruby’s idioms, which is annoying, but also points out a couple things he likes better about Ruby. But, yeah, it seems like he wants a feature-for-feature Python analog and is disappointed when he doesn’t get it.
April 9th, 2008 at 6:52 am (Quote ↓)
While he doesn’t show a very thorough understanding of how Ruby works, he has a few good points. Unicode support, for example, is terrible, and.. well, it’s 2008, you absolutely have to support and use Unicode, everywhere. There is comprehensive documentation for most things having to do with Ruby, it’s just that it’s not centralised and can be hard to find and read for someone who’s new.
Most of the other complaints consist of comparing it to Python and then deciding it’s not as good because it’s different.
He’ll probably get a lot of attention though, because people are suckers for articles like this, although experienced Ruby programmers have stopped caring a long time ago.