10 reasons not to use Ruby

"Java and PHP have been around long before Ruby."<p>It seems like they are confusing Ruby and Rails in the first point. PHP, Java, and Ruby were all first publicly released in 1995.<p>From their respective Wikipedia articles:<p>"Lerdorf released PHP/FI as "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0" publicly on June 8, 1995"<p>"Sun Microsystems released the first public implementation as Java 1.0 in 1995."<p>"The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on December 21, 1995."

Like Php and other languages, Ruby has one severe sickness: “One thing Perl’s my() gives you is a guarantee that you aren’t stomping on a given variable. For example, if I’m in a block of code in Perl and want to use a private variable I can just declare it with my() and never have to worry about whether a variable of that name existed previously. In Ruby, if you are inside of a block and want a private variable, you need to choose a variable name that has never been used before. I don’t want to have to hold the entire symbol table in my head!! What can I do?” source: <a href="http://gabrito.com/post/ruby-needs-my-for-variable-declaration-and-scoping" rel="nofollow">http://gabrito.com/post/ruby-needs-my-for-variable-declarati...</a>

The ruby "community" is visibly a lot more snobbish and condescending than other languages of similar power (python); the whole ruby culture seems to be this toxic one where you're respected in proportion to how rude you are. The whole tone of this article is a good example, actually. Note the complete denial that there might be tradeoffs and legitimate reasons not to use ruby; rather, anyone not using it must be an idiot.

As a Ruby learner I have to say this post isn't helping.<p>Yes Ruby is a great language. That's why I learn it in the first place. But a post like this make people think the author is "hardselling" the language. And good things do not need to be hardsold. Ruby itself isn't opinionated. But this post is. In fact if I know nothing about Ruby and its community, I would have drawn the conclusion from this post that Rubyists are arrogant and opinionated.<p>People really should not try to convert other's language usage. If the language itself can not convince a person, neither can you.

This reads a lot like blog posts from back when Rails was catching on (~2005). I thought we'd moved on since then: I genuinely wanted to read an intelligent critique on the Ruby language.

What exactly was the point of this blog post? Quite a few of those reasons are valid and none of the arguments against the 10 reasons are good. It reads like "OMG BUT RUBY! MY PRECIOUS!!1"

<i>6. Ruby is too opinionated and takes away my freedom to do things my way</i><p>Convention over configuration is mainly a rails thing, right? When I was learning Ruby there were quite a few ways of going about accomplishing your task, only there was often a <i>more efficient</i> way of doing things (e.g. using blocks instead of loops, etc.)

His arguments are so generic that you can change Ruby with any other language and a lot of his arguments still work.

Reason #11: Ruby isn't fun. ;)

This isn't constructive topic. Don't feed the troll.

subtext: ruby is awesome, i'm a massive fanboy and you should use it.

omg why :/