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To be honest, at least since Rails, the Ruby community has had a "cultural problem" of denial; Ruby is an academic language designed in academia for academic an

To be honest, at least since Rails, the Ruby community has had a "cultural problem" of denial; Ruby is an academic language designed in academia for academic and theoretical problem sets. It's not really practical in most cases, especially when compared to a language of the same class that was designed for pragmatism and real-world usage, like Python. One could say "PHP was designed for pragmatism" but then they'd have to argue PHP was "designed" in the first place, and not just kind of accidentally snowballed from a hobby into a major platform. DHH latched on to Ruby via Rails and hyped it up and suddenly Rails became the cool kid on the block, but I don't really feel that's deserved from an engineering standpoint. Rails has always been a lot of sizzle and only a little steak, from ill-conceived and convoluted workflows dressed up as "awesome, because it's better than your PHP site!" and rigidity and inability to adapt to normal needs dressed up as "opinionated design". DHH is the only notable programmer so thick that he actually asserts mathematical background is not helpful to development, and that you should take writing classes instead, and I think that tells a lot about his general practices and his uninformed attachment to Ruby, which has propagated across to others as 37signals got coverage in our communities and more posers jumped on the bandwagon.

hakaaaaak 14y ago
"Ruby is an academic language designed in academia for academic and theoretical problem sets" You make that FUD up yourself? What about Chef, Puppet, writing Ruby scripts for general purpose apps, JRuby (better than Groovy when you can use both jars and gems!), the fact that RedHat's OpenShift (Cloud Hosting of J2EE, etc.) platform depends on Ruby- the list goes on and on.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  >You make that FUD up yourself? No. Matz built Ruby because he thought Perl and Python weren't object-oriented enough. This is decidedly an academic concern. Ridiculously, Matz decided to take Perl over Python as the inspiration for most of his syntax, and if you've looked at Ruby code and gotten Perl flashbacks as I have, there's a good reason for it: it's supposed to be like a super object-oriented Perl. If you love Perl then that's great for you, but there is no reason to presume that Ruby has any real-world applicability. It's basically just Matz's opinion on "how Perl ought to be". It seems my timeline was a bit incorrect in that Matz apparently worked for a commercial entity when Ruby was conceived, but in a theoretical division ("head of research"). So perhaps the comment should be altered to "Ruby is an academic language designed for theoretical research applications". It has almost no practical redemptive features as compared to modern Python or Lua, MRI is slow and unusable for memory-intensive applications, the syntax is a jumble of esoteric symbols and inconveniences, and so on. There is really no reason, on either a linguistic or practical engineering basis, to prefer it over other scripting languages. People are, and have been since DHH successfully poured his coat of snake oil out, just jumping on the Rails bandwagon and buying that whole song and dance, which was originally produced to promote DHH's consulting firm. That's not to say some people haven't taken the language and done cool stuff with it, but it's not relevant to the question of the language's individual worthiness.
  - hakaaaaak 14y ago
    I use Ruby because it is clear and it is the most practical and effective language I've ever used. I'm glad you like Python. Have fun with it. For others to compare, here are some examples on the c2 wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRubyCodeExamples http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRubyCodeExamples and stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113611/what-does-ruby-have-that-python-doesnt-and-vice-versa http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113611/what-does-ruby-ha...

hakaaaaak 14y ago

"Ruby is an academic language designed in academia for academic and theoretical problem sets" You make that FUD up yourself? What about Chef, Puppet, writing Ruby scripts for general purpose apps, JRuby (better than Groovy when you can use both jars and gems!), the fact that RedHat's OpenShift (Cloud Hosting of J2EE, etc.) platform depends on Ruby- the list goes on and on.

cookiecaper 14y ago
>You make that FUD up yourself? No. Matz built Ruby because he thought Perl and Python weren't object-oriented enough. This is decidedly an academic concern. Ridiculously, Matz decided to take Perl over Python as the inspiration for most of his syntax, and if you've looked at Ruby code and gotten Perl flashbacks as I have, there's a good reason for it: it's supposed to be like a super object-oriented Perl. If you love Perl then that's great for you, but there is no reason to presume that Ruby has any real-world applicability. It's basically just Matz's opinion on "how Perl ought to be". It seems my timeline was a bit incorrect in that Matz apparently worked for a commercial entity when Ruby was conceived, but in a theoretical division ("head of research"). So perhaps the comment should be altered to "Ruby is an academic language designed for theoretical research applications". It has almost no practical redemptive features as compared to modern Python or Lua, MRI is slow and unusable for memory-intensive applications, the syntax is a jumble of esoteric symbols and inconveniences, and so on. There is really no reason, on either a linguistic or practical engineering basis, to prefer it over other scripting languages. People are, and have been since DHH successfully poured his coat of snake oil out, just jumping on the Rails bandwagon and buying that whole song and dance, which was originally produced to promote DHH's consulting firm. That's not to say some people haven't taken the language and done cool stuff with it, but it's not relevant to the question of the language's individual worthiness.
- hakaaaaak 14y ago
  I use Ruby because it is clear and it is the most practical and effective language I've ever used. I'm glad you like Python. Have fun with it. For others to compare, here are some examples on the c2 wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRubyCodeExamples http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRubyCodeExamples and stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113611/what-does-ruby-have-that-python-doesnt-and-vice-versa http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113611/what-does-ruby-ha...