He admits that he doesn't know Ruby deeply, but then he goes on to assert that Ruby people don't seem to create messes that paint themselves into corners.
From what I've read plenty of people have done just that in Ruby because of monkeypatching.
From what I've read plenty of people have done just that in Ruby because of monkeypatching.
Rubyists most certainly DO hang themselves with monkeypatching, quite often. You just don't tend to hear about the ones that to that, because the sites they build that way don't survive long enough for anyone to notice, assuming that they even launch them successfully, which is rare.
I think in fact that because Ruby is a much more forgiving language than, say, C++ (the same goes for Python), the average caliber of Ruby developers is FAR lower than the caliber of, say, C++ and Lisp developers. My experience with Ruby and Python developers hasn't been positive -- in fact, working at a Python shop gave me an intense distaste for the language, and my experience at a Ruby shop lead to similar sentiments among a lot of the senior developers who worked there.
Oh, and having interviewed C++ developers, I am not sure I can agree that the average C++ programmer is of higher caliber than the average Ruby programmer. C++ is something that these people learn because they think they will get a high-paying job in the financial sector. Ruby is something people learn because they think programming is cool. (Admittedly, the Ruby community's aggressive marketing has gotten a lot of people that shouldn't be programming into programming, and that's bad for their community. But wanting to be a cool Rubyist like _why causes a lot less damage than wanting to have a high-paying job.)
Anyway, Ruby is fine when used by someone with a clue. C++, not so much.
I'm not confused at all. Rubyists sunk the project, plain and simple. I actually still like Ruby, because I had a chance to do some cool stuff with it before our inferior rubyists wrought their havoc, and I agree that had we had decent management, they'd have been fired.
My only criticism of Ruby is that because it's easy, it allows vastly inferior programmers to program, which lowers the bar drastically. I believe that a number of the other senior developers there won't touch ruby at all now, I'm not one of those.
However, given one of the jobs I received e-mail about, I'd say that the salaries that rubyists can get puts them in the worst of both worlds -- it attracts people who want to be cool, and people who want high-paying jobs. Plus, it's easy to learn badly, which sets the bar very low.
Wrong. Every language allows this. Have you ever read enterprise Java or C++ code?
In my experience this is a myth or a at least a stereotype more prevalent in the marketing of Rails than reality.
I had the strong impression during my stint in the Rails world that Ruby was mostly learned as a signaling device. Young developer slaving away at some random Java or PHP job dreaming of making it big in a startup, with the mistaken believe that simply hanging around the in-crowd will magically catapult him in the top 5% of their profession.
Sure there are good people in this community, but they became good by working hard for a very long time and not by writing a trivial Twitter client using the currently hot testing framework/NoSQL database on their MacBook Pro in a Starbucks after skimming through the pick axe book.
wanting to be a cool Rubyist like _why causes a lot less damage than wanting to have a high-paying job
Why should chasing fame be inherently better than chasing money?
Just speaking from my own experience, I learned way more from cynic mercenaries than from wannabe rockstars and I can't see why emulating e.g. Obie Fernandez will cause less damage than aiming for a position as a technical fellow.
Than you seem to have had much more luck than I did.
Ruby programmers get themselves into plenty of trouble. Of course, so do Java programmers, or any other programmers. The problem is people, not programming language features. (Except manual memory management, as per C. That's a language problem.)
Some succeed, some fail.
Rather like using pointers, in most ways, which can also cause some pretty unmaintainable messes, but don't if you're really, really careful :-)
Your argument seems to have a slight inconsistency.
Tends to be the people who think of modifying open classes as "monkeypatching" who fuck it up because they still see it as some sort of quirk in the language rather than just another part of the language ecosystem.