Some good discussion on this one. It’s nice to see Ruby people saying things like this (5th message from the top, from Song Ma):
Interesting. But what I am thinking about is not the attitude of the author, but the points he was trying to make. The deep review and discussion will benefit the language insights.
Or this one (from Trans, on the same forum):
Why is everyone getting so worked up? It’s a critique. Biased it may be, but that in itself does not make it worthless. In fact, it can be very constructive b/c it uncovers “attack points” with the language. With each point we can ask ourselves objectively is this a misconception or a fair point? In either case we have an opportunity, to address misconceptions in our Ruby evangelizing blogs and to work to improve Ruby where a point has merit.
Bias can work both ways. But I think the Ruby community can rise above it, and Ruby will be all the better for it.
And from Peter Cooper at Ruby Inside:
As it is, I think he’s missing the point a lot of the time (he tends to think Python’s better because he likes its conventions more than Ruby’s – not a compelling argument), but it’s an interesting read none the less. Anything that keeps our minds open to the fact that Ruby != perfection is worth a look.
And a comment on the same post:
Let’s take his best points and incorporate them into future versions of Ruby.
Sounds like a plan.
I saw a few counterarguments like this:
Everything he’s saying is well known.
Just because a problem is well known inside a community doesn’t make it any less of a problem.
Everybody who mentioned documentation, even those who disagreed strongly with the rest of my post, agreed that Ruby’s documentation is seriously lacking. In fact, a lot of the mistakes in my original post are due to me not being able to easily find an explanation of something on the various Ruby doc sites. Which leads me to…