I suspect that many of these same Rubyists who mistakenly assumed ^ and $ have the normal PCRE semantics would still readily claim to know Ruby, and in many cas

I suspect that many of these same Rubyists who mistakenly assumed ^ and $ have the normal PCRE semantics would still readily claim to know Ruby, and in many cases, even to know it well. I think this type of vulnerability undermines the optimistic belief that any decent programmer can quickly learn a new language, and further, it shows the danger of adopting new languages generally, especially those with extremely complex and not particularly well-defined syntax and semantics, like Ruby. I also wonder how many vulnerabilities result just from Rubyists favoring cutesy APIs (or "DSLs," as they call them) that while making for great demos, hide the often times unignorable, crucial details of what they do from their users.