I love Ruby (… contextually, with the most important part of that context being “for small programs”) and its general culture (_why is/was amazing) but hate Rails.

In practice this means I don’t use Ruby professionally any more, because there aren’t a lot of non-Rails Ruby jobs. And since I write a lot of python at work, that’s my go-to for my own quick little personal scripts, too, just for simplicity’s sake as far as what I have to keep in “working memory”, if you will. Plus it’s already installed on most systems I touch, unlike Ruby.

Like I do care about how “joyful” a language is but I also care about how hard it is to work with if a codebase has been through a bunch of contractors’ and agencies’ hands and it’s kind of a mess and the test suite hasn’t been updated during two full years of active development. For my own “joy”’s sake, give me Go or c# or maybe even Java if you must, under those circumstances. It’s unlikely I’ll find much joy in Ruby when that’s happened, which is often.