> Rails unarguably attracted a vast number of web designers Why? > low-impact way to learn some server-side dev Ruby is not low-impact. There's this myth th

> Rails unarguably attracted a vast number of web designers Why? > low-impact way to learn some server-side dev Ruby is not low-impact. There's this myth that Ruby is lightweight, easy to read, and simple to get into. I seriously question if any of the people who perpetuate this myth have ever actually attempted to program Ruby. Ruby source code is incredibly ugly and difficult to read. There is so much "magic" going on that it is difficult to begin to even understand what the code is supposed to do [1]. Ruby's syntax is incredibly aggravating. I've found it damn near impossible to understand even trivial programs without consulting the manual every three or four tokens. Worse, the language is ambiguous: is that colon a symbol, or a dictionary mapping, or a ternary operator? And this is leaving out that Ruby == Rails to a huge extent, so much of the documentation and examples that are out there are burdened by the further complexity of a large web application framework. I've found Ruby so obtuse and unnatural that every time I've tried to learn it, I've quickly become so aggravated at the language's awful syntax and strange abstractions that I simply give up. If Ruby's warts are bad enough to make someone with my programming-heavy background desert it before making much headway, why did "Rails unarguably attract...a vast number of web designers"? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899