So here’s a question, why not Python ? (Django ?) - far more mature than Ruby and has a far more powerful library - far larger code base. Hope I’m not off base here.

I have played with ruby myself a little bit, on and off since 2006 , I know I am a late comer. these are my thoughts about Ruby.

1) after so many years, it’s still like 2% in the Tiobe ranking

2) its weak typing, many people have said this is an asset, but I don’t. agree. Weak typing is a dsadvantage in my experience (working with very large apps in a big Financial Institution, running 24×7 ). Rubyists have always countered with a “do more testing” approach , but I don’t agree this will catch all your problems. I believe you have to have strong typing combined with a “do more testing” approach is better, especially when you are working in large teams where every one can touch any code.

3) speed is still a problem after so many years, everyone knows it’s a problem and yet the community is so slow to address that.

4) by the time, the ruby language and framework, has fixed its problems, the fad will have died and tne crowd will have moved on to the next big thing.

5) features in ruby is being and will be copied in existing languages and new languages

6) there are too many ways of doing the same thing in Ruby and this is a disadvantage as well, as this means if you are working in a big team, you have to learn every little nut and bolt of the language to be able support an application. that means, the learning curve is actually higher. In a one man team this is ok, because that one man picks one style and sticks to it and doesn’t have to worry about other people’s coding. It’s like driving on the street, you don’t have to think if the car next to you is going to drive left or right, and this prevents accidents. can you imagine for one moment that people are allowed to drive left and right in any direction ? what will happen?
I am aware that Saphire is trying to redo Ruby, with only one way of doing things. maybe this will help.

7) I think it’s safer in terms of longevity of languages to stay with Java and .net. because at some point Ruby will be forked and a new variant with a lot of differnt things added, will come out, fragmenting the market even more, which will reduce the current 2% to even less.

the big institutions are not doing Ruby. only startups, with basic CRUD applications.

9) last but not the least, the absence of a specification hurts the language. by the time the specs will come out and “accepted” by the community, it will be too late. Languages like Scala will already be well established.

10) the community looks and acts too amateurish. I don’t believe even Sun’s and Microsoft’s presence will be able to change that. Unless they fork their own versions, in which case that will cause fragmentation of the ruby community, with its adverse impacts to the ruby community as a whole.

anyway these are my thoughts. sure people may disagree with what I said, but every one is free to one’s own opinion. Let’s wait and see, only the future will tell whether one is right or not

I hope it is not my version of ruby or I have misunderstood or something daft like that.

Interesting articles indeed and helping me get appraised with my other material. Ignore the naysayers, call the blog what you like! Really looking forward to 6 thru 10!

Monkey patching is in general - even in the Ruby world - considered bad practise. But the functionality is there to be used after all, and as long as it is done carefully, I and many others see no problem with it. Some of the best and most useful code. i.e. Rails plugins, are created based on a little monkey patching.

It’s a date! A Year from now, I will be writing a post about why Ruby is still better than PHP.

Thx for your comment guys.

“WTF!? Using slashes just looks wrong! Slashes are used in directory paths, and that is where they should stay.”

Yup, I at first I thought exactly that as well, but I’ve been working with 5.3 a bit, I after a while I realized that I *just didn’t care*.

Also, slash separators seem quite natural once you realize that (with relatively few exceptions) any sane developer will use a consistent class-(or namespace-)-to-file naming convention, so that directory and namespace names match up 1:1.

“…why should I have to declare my namespace at the very top of the file and no where else?”

You don’t. This point has gone back and forth several times (which is probably why the current documentation on it is wrong), but you can declare a new namespace anywhere (outside a block) in a file, and all classes etc. which appear after the new declaration will be created within it.

Finally (and this is a comment I meant to leave on your previous post), lots of languages support features that enable horizontal code re-use. As of 5.3, PHP even natively supports tacking closures onto classes as callable methods (as well as much more advanced hackery through the runkit extension). However, of all the languages and all the developer communities I know of, Ruby (and Rails in particular) is the only one that considers cracking open and tampering with classes at runtime a good idea. Elsewhere this is known as “monkey-patching”, and is considered bad practice.

That said, I’d be interested to see a blog post from you a year from now on how easily maintainable your CodaSet app is.