

On Ruby - tel
http://hawkins.io/2015/03/on-ruby/

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MrBra
Thanks! The effort you put in highlighting and describing all these coding
pattern problems and/or language design issues is really strong and this is
interesting, given you also stated how much you are loosing interest for this
ecosystem and trying to sail away for new ones. Honestly, what I see when I
read these kind of articles is more of a cry of sadness for having to leave
something which we would never want to leave, than a joy hymn to a better,
newly discovered replacement path.

I wish, and I am sure you wished too, that the Ruby community could address
all these issue in a reasonable time in order to not leave.. or at least not
completely. But no matter how much strong this feeling is, it simply happens
at some point that enough is enough, and you get sick of having to go through
something in a way which even though it's great at the start it becomes more
complicated than what it should actually be.

In my opinion though it's not a _fault_ in Ruby, but it's simply all about
Ruby's age and what we do expect from it. If its metaprogramming qualities and
syntax and great object model were able to trigger the creation of something
like Rails 10 years ago and not now for example, then it had to come with both
pros and cons, to which you can always subtract 10 years of messy PHP and add
up the inspiring of those whole new languages and frameworks you are
considering to switch to NOW.

Honestly I am happy Ruby/Rails happened in time to be synergistic with my
developer life, and I too fight with frustrations the Ruby ecosystem gives,
but I can't feel like accusing it because it was like a very experimental
thing, a prototype, that had great power but that nobody really consistently
and concretely (big $) helped developing fully. Nonetheless it can already -
only by standing on its feet - empower your start up at a fraction of the
complexity (=cost) of other solutions. And, yes, its design will synthesize
your ideas beautifully, which helps think faster.

Actually I think it's this exact struggle that keeps still alive and going the
Ruby community. It's like as if we found the holy grail in a remote deep
cavern, and were totally wicked by it, but then we discovered that we could
only use it in that cavern. And even more frustratingly so, for some reasons
this cavern was so far never dug up open by some multi-billionaire _ruby
miner_.. hell it's so absurd that one can easily get hypnotized down there,
staring at the beauty of the Ruby, while telling themselves that someone with
bigger excavators shall notice it soon too.

