alt Hacker NewsIn the original article, author never actually went into why they disliked their experience with Ruby. They listed some historical shortcomings which we can only presume they were experiencing on the code base they found themself working on. I think the best point out of that first article was don't pick Ruby as a development language in 2025, there are better options for any advantage you might think it will give you.
I think that should've been the main point to attack.
In the present article, the author went for pathos instead and in some ironic sense confirmed the previous article's notion that Ruby is powered by sentimentality.
Many people that adore Elixir also think Ruby is a no go, despite the latter being a strong influence. Arguments against Elixir tend to revolve around its lack of traction, not its lack of seriousness.
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ruby comes preinstalled on macos. so if you want to script a mac without installers or non oob software, it’s that or perl or bash or appkescript.
YMMV, but both articles are two nothingburgers. First one doesn't say a thing about what's possibly wrong Ruby language but rambles something about StackOverflow popularity and Twitter issues, second one doesn't say a thing about what's wrong with the first article and just tells a tale about Ol' Good Times and aesthetic differences.
The fact that it's not some LLM-produced slop for engagement, but something that was written by real humans and is somehow paid attention by real humans is sort of depressing.
> Many people that adore Elixir also think Ruby is a no go, despite the latter being a strong influence. Arguments against Elixir tend to revolve around its lack of traction, not its lack of seriousness.
Elixir is funny. I've done Elixir for years now, and did some Ruby at the beginning of my career. A ton of people come to Elixir for the familiarity of the Ruby-like syntax but with a functional programming basis. They like Ruby but get tired of OOP and mutable state and want to try something else. They tend to stay for the runtime/VM, called the BEAM.
Don't get me wrong, the Elixir language is nice, but the BEAM and its operational characteristics feel night-and-day compared to Ruby and most other languages that were designed for a world of single-threaded programming.
When you're using the BEAM (any language - there are a few now) there's this amazing sense that you're using something that was _designed to be operated_. You can instrument anything. You can trace anything. You can see the live state of anything. You can restart anything. It's a holistic _system_ for building systems, not just a language.