Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't)

The article sounds so beautiful, so beautiful, all the joy and the flowers and the harmony and the japanese and the danish and the total lack of language wars and crusades ... sorry, seems I've fallen asleep at the keyboard.<p>Anyone remember how you felt when you moved from C++ to Java? Wasn't it a joy? As if somebody had thought, hey I'll make a language for people to enjoy. No memory management! Yeah! No obscure macros! Just clean, beautiful code that everybody could immediately understand and nobody would shoot themselves in the foot.<p>We didn't think about how many times we would have to type getSomeField() { ... } and setSomeField(...) {...}. We didn't think about how entire frameworks, byte code manipulation weirdness, special purpose runtime containers, poorly integrated language extensions, etc would have to be written and deployed to overcome the metaprogramming deficiencies of Java. We were so glad to get rid of those breathtaking C++ compiler errors resulting from template crazyness that we didn't think about how statically typed languages really need type parameters. <p>For short, we didn't think about anything relating to the power of the language, we just felt joy and a big relief that the C++ curse had been taken from our souls, aching for harmony.<p>At least for myself I can say I'm not going to make that same mistake a second time. F..k harmony and joy! Let's switch our brains on before we jump onto the next language! I'll take a language war any day if it makes me think hard about how the features of a language behave once a system grows.

While haven't recently seen it , the ruby-talk list has had a permathread of "Python v. Ruby". With the exception of some trolling, the responses tended to be some variant of "try both and pick the one that best fits your head."<p>I was struck by how little the Ruby community (at least at the time; this may have changed in the last year or two) seemed to care if other people dropped their current fav language to become Ruby converts. Rather, the mood was, if you choose Ruby, great, we're here to help and welcome, but if you don't, we hope you choose something that makes you happy.

<i>The messianic zeal of Christianity's shameful Crusades a thousand years ago</i><p>What a strange tangent. The Muslims were in the "holy land" (and a thousand other places) because of incomparably violent zeal. I suppose the defense of Vienna is also shameful for the zeal of the Sobieski.

I wish the author said <i>why</i> programming in Ruby makes him feel good. His statements could be made about any language. Many people program in language X because they like language X, and that doesn't apply just to Ruby. "I program in Ruby because it makes me feel good" is an empty statement.<p>Did you program in other languages? Did they also make you feel good? Why/why not? Do you think languages in which you haven't programmed could make you feel even better than Ruby?<p>I hope most people who program in Ruby have better reasons than "it makes me feel good." If they didn't, I wouldn't feel good programming in Ruby.

This idea is definitely a step forward for me in understanding why I prefer one language over another. Thanks to the poster.