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ah, that topic... Well, for what its worth, I mostly agree with the author, except I never felt Ruby has made me "happy" more than any other programming languag

ah, that topic... Well, for what its worth, I mostly agree with the author, except I never felt Ruby has made me "happy" more than any other programming language with at least some semi-decent features. Its problems make up for its features and, at the end of the day, it has enough annoying parts to make me angry at times. The new features, of course, is pointless. It solves no problem, but brings with it the typical downsides of adding a new language feature. It reinvents the wheel, but makes it triangle-shaped, and tells you it's only meant for crash-tests anyway.

59nadir 8y ago
> Well, for what its worth, I mostly agree with the author, except I never felt Ruby has made me "happy" more than any other programming language with at least some semi-decent features. In surveys, Ruby hasn't (to my knowledge) scored highest in developer happiness for a very long time (if ever). Languages that don't tie themselves to a subjective tagline like that do, though. Rust, for example, has a pretty clear direction and mission and has some of the most excited and happy users in every survey I've seen. Trying to talk about developer happiness as some kind of defining characteristic has always been a bad idea and I think, ironically, you end up with unhappy users by using it as an ideal to make change in your language. I think it only gets worse when the paradigm the language is built on and how it expresses that paradigm is also susceptible to more bugs than the alternatives. The only real way to optimize for developer happiness is to optimize aggressively for simplicity. The entire foundation of Ruby is a barrier to that and it doesn't have the good tooling, interactivity or introspection of something like Smalltalk to handle that.