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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

You're confused. Rubyists didn't sink your project. Bad programming (and management) did. They would have fucked up the project in Java or Haskell or Perl or anything else.

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.

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Ruby is something people learn because they think programming is cool.

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.

"You're confused. Rubyists didn't sink your project. Bad programming (and management) did. They would have fucked up the project in Java or Haskell or Perl or anything else."

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?

Actually it's entirely true. Ruby allows VASTLY inferior programmers to program. Java and C++ set slightly higher bars; at least with them you have to reach inferior, as opposed to vastly inferior, in order to make stuff work.

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