A Startling Admission

[wtd]

I have learned through my years of experience that there is nothing wrong with changing my mind. It isn't hypoocrisy. It's just a matter of realizing when I've been mistaken and setting forth to do things as correctly as possible in the future.

It is with this in mind that I have to admit to myself and others that my promotion of Ruby has been misguided. Though impressive it was at the time I first learned it, I now realize that Ruby is an unfortunately limited language, and that learning it is a waste of time, when other more worthy languages are available.

Ruby lacks a deep appreciation of functional programming. It gets about halfway there with blocks, and control structures that return values, but then fails to go the rest of the way. I believe this is not only a shortcoming of the language, but also highly detrimental to the student learning it.

I have also come to realize that Ruby is simply too dynamic. It is possible for code to be written in such a way that it takes advantage of naming to convey information that should be expressed in other more robust ways. "Don't Repeat Yourself" is just another way of saying, "make assumptions," and we all know that leads nowhere good.

Worse yet, Ruby endears itself to a person. It encourages those who learn it to love it, often to the point that they cannot see just how deeply flawed it is.

[Cervantes]

I was going to reply to this with a, "wtd, you're out of your mind!" response, but since thinking more on it, I find that wtd is, once again, correct.

Ruby is a rather over-hyped language. Sure, it was fun to learn. But now that I've spent more time with it and am programming a large project in it, I am finding a great deal of quirks and annoyances.

Another problem is the community. Ruby has been around for quite a long time, but its community can't compare to those of the bigger languages. Part of the problem here is that it was isolated in Japan for a long time. Lots of documentation is in Japanese. Trying to get SDL to work with Ruby? Good luck, unless you can read Japanese.

[[Gandalf]]

Though I've been in the Ruby scene for far shorter than both Minsc and wtd, I would have to say I agree.

Ever since I started learning it, I have come across numerous things which make no sense what-so-ever. Take the following code as an example:

code:

puts "ha" * 3.14159

Not only does it completely ignore logic (multiply a string, anyone?), but it also doesn't work as it's supposed to! Try it yourself. That's not 3.14159 "ha"s you are seeing on the screen, is it? Even Turing will give you a decent "operands of * must be both integer or real, or compatible sets" error message.

My two cents.

[TokenHerbz]

I think wtd should creat his own lang because he knows alot, and then he can make it how it should!!!

it might take a while, but it should test your limits yeah?

[Dan]

Ya i mean come on ruby on rails is a joke, php is just so much better. I mean white space and line breaks should effect the out come! And who needs all that useless debuging info that comes from ruby when you could have the joys of php error reporting. Also who whonts that much serucity? With php it keeps us progamers enmplyoped when a new expolite comes out every other day or your scripts soundly stop working becauses some one upgraded php. It is also way to easy and effsient to use ajax in ruby on rails, it should be done the old fashen way. Hard coding it right in to your half php and html mess. Affter all if it is hard to understand it means they can not replace you .

And don't even get me started on how ruby and rails works with mysql. I like writing 1000 mysql comands in to my code. Where has the fun of that gone too? Where dam it!!!

[codemage]

This is an april fools' day joke, right wtd? Normally you'd take bits away for such blasphemy.

[rizzix]

LOL

[Martin]

It's because I'm learning it, isn't it?

[Andy]

yes that is exactly right martin.. god forbid, can you imagine YOU learning something THAT useful?

[wtd]

Martin wrote:

It's because I'm learning it, isn't it?

Yes. Absolutely.

[Martin]

Andy wrote:

yes that is exactly right martin.. god forbid, can you imagine YOU learning something THAT useful?

That's it. I'm going back to Obfuscated Perl and never leaving.

[Cervantes]

http://www.bitwisemag.com/copy/features/opinion/ruby/ruby_debate.html
Two programmers who apparently spend a lot of time with Ruby discuss it's downsides. Really, they don't mention too many distinct points. It's a pretty short article! compared to what such an article would look like for worse languages.

[rizzix]

I think they have pointed out some very serious flaws. They are not simple flaws that can simply be ignored. Side-effects are a Bad Thing. But then again one can argue (for one of those points anyway..) that Ruby constants is like java's final, i.e. they do not denote immutability, but simply unchangeable references. Yet, it seems that people _expect_ ruby constants to include immutability... So that could (or should is say "should"?) definitely change.

And then again the local variables and block scopes. That is a Terrible Thing. It has to change. Just imagine trying to debug code that has been affected by this side-effect. Oh the horror!

And distinguishing between expressions and statements... oh well I'd really like to see how they do this for ruby without bloating the language or compromising it's functionality.. It would definitely be interesting..

[Null]

I'm confused. Is this a joke, or a serious topic?

I should point out that I am incredibly gullable, and I often miss the true intention of obvious humour.

[Tony]

for those who have not caught on, this was an April Fool's joke. Check out the post's date. Wow, that has been a while...