The maintainability criticism is nothing new, or unique to Ruby — it has been something that has been leveled at every dynamically-typed language (eg., Python,

The maintainability criticism is nothing new, or unique to Ruby — it has been something that has been leveled at every dynamically-typed language (eg., Python, Perl) ever since they started to become popular for writing big apps. And it's still untrue. It comes from prejudice and fear about the lack of compile-time checks in dynamic languages. I know this personally, because I remember starting out with Python, and Java and C++ felt very safe — on a visceral level — in comparison, and Python felt very unsafe. I have since learned to recognize these feelings as irrational and unfounded. Any language allows you to shoot yourself in the foot, in different ways. It's just as easy to write an unmaintainable app in C++ as it is in Ruby.