I wouldn't say I'm a C programmer at all though I did manage to struggle through producing a very simple C-extension for Ruby once. Recently, I had to debug one

I wouldn't say I'm a C programmer at all though I did manage to struggle through producing a very simple C-extension for Ruby once. Recently, I had to debug one that wouldn't install. Could I find well written, up to date documents? No. I found bits and pieces scattered in blog posts and gists, and wildly different ways of making extensions. It was incredibly vexing and I would've happily used Python - or anything else - at that moment. The number of times I find hardcoded paths in Ruby extensions is mind boggling. I guess "it works on my computer" is okay for some but to me it seems amateurish. I don't blame the library authors as much as the core team for this because the documentation and examples are so bad. Not a good look for a mature language. I'm looking at learning Crystal and Elixir because they'll (hopefully in Crystal's case) fix a lot of the glaring-but-never-fixed problems in the Ruby ecosystem for me. Ironically enough I've spent my afternoon fighting with a Ruby C-extension that won't install!