(Does that make Ruby a good programming language? That's unclear to me; what's clear is that I have fun writing it.)
I always understood Rust to be for low level “close to the metal” sort of software. Is it at a point where it’s suitable for writing web applications?
I know it’s “possible” with frameworks like Rocket, but I’d like to know if Rust is at a point where it can compete in the web app space with Rails, Go, Node/Express, etc.
It's a high-level language, it just has its own rules that encourage correctness and prohibit sloppiness (which is a de-facto standard in the webdev industry, especially when prototyping rapidly by throwing shit at the wall and then letting whatever stuck live in production until it's no longer manageable).
For better or worse, Rust simply doesn't forgive a lot of things that are easy to do elsewhere, like not caring about less probable scenarios.
And, again, for better or worse, you also have to satisfy the borrow checker, where in other languages there's simply no such thing. Which is sometimes easy as calling clone() (not always a good idea), but sometimes can be quite a headache thinking about value lifetimes and how you just can't have something somewhere else (which can be super subtle so you wouldn't normally think about it in other languages with GC).
Perl felt like that in the 90s. Ruby (not Rails) seemed like it was trying to do a better Perl - better OO, better functional style, better syntax, etc. Both of them inspired a lot of things in other languages. And lots of people groan and complain about both of them today.
From what I can tell, a lot of complaints are from people who don't really like to code. Expressiveness means choice and that means thinking about coding instead of just following a "one way to do it" pattern over and over. Thoughtful coding, making something unique and making it easier than other examples, is also the kind of coding that LLMs can't do - they only munge together mediocrity out of what exists.
The complaints are from the poor suckers who had to maintain that "mirthful" code after it was written. Writing greenfield code is already fun in most languages; understanding existing code is already the hard part, and having to decode the "unique" thoughts of whoever came before you makes it worse.