(Still continuing ...)

> I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after.

So he acknowledges how his own analogy is tainted. If Weimar worked so well, why would the Nazis have had success? Yes, people are stupid, you see it with Trump voters or ultra-right voters in Europe; many vote because of having lost in other areas, in particular the economy right now (very similar to 1933 in many ways), but the main point is that Weimar nowhere near as much was a success model as the author of the article tries to show. And I don't see why any of that has to do with DHH and his Kool Aid preaching style. I find it a lame style but that may be just me.

> Why, of all the things we now can do in Ruby, do we choose to do Rust vibe- > rewrites?

I don't. Then again I am not a DHH fanboi so ...

> It would be a pain to generate a PDF with layout - there were no libraries

Prawn was ok. hexapdf is even better. I regular try to get the hexapdf to improve the pdf-autogeneration part. Hexapdf is very good, so ... there were no libraries? Well, when exactly? Prawn is old: at the least 2008

https://rubygems.org/gems/prawn/versions/0.1.0

> You could no longer build native GUI applications - there were no libraries

Well, ruby-gtk worked, even on windows by the way. Since then it has decayed. My modifications of GTK core classes no longer worked. I tried to get kou to think about this problem some years ago. Nothing changed, all my old code is dead. So I decided to call it quits and no longer use ruby-gtk. Also because of GTK5 going to abandon xorg-server. I fail to see why I want to support their wayland-only crap future. Let's see whether this will succeed though:

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

and:

https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng

Granted, there may be a lack of developers for both, but do we really want to be locked down by corporate hackers that try to control the downstream situation? Both QT and GTK have this problem, for different reasons. I am absolutely tired of corporate shenanigans leaking into ecosystems and ruining them.

> And a lot of people would just throw up their hands in desperation and > utter The Spell Of Dread:

> Nobody does this sort of thing with Ruby anyway.

Thankfully I could not care what others say. Unfortunately, Ruby is also declining, and has been in the last years. There is no way to deny it. The numbers are strong here. If you google for "ruby is dead", you will find things such as "no, it is aging like fine wine". People simply try to deny the reality - that's interesting. But it is not an analysis.

> a Rubyist willing to produce PDF files from their Rails app would be facing a choice of a number of options, all equally unappealing

Interesting how he does not mention hexapdf. Now, I am not claiming hexapdf may be able to solve all rails issues here, but what is interesting is how he does not even know all possibilities in ruby. Is he a rails guy or something?

He mentions:

Gotenberg, Ferrum, Prawn and wkhtmltopdf.

I stopped reading there. IMO if you critisize DHH, and this is well-deserved after the damage he caused in the ruby ecosystem, followed up by him hating on wolves and then casually ... mentioning how immigrants are like wolves (I have no idea what DHH is thinking; I think he is roleplaying the promo-role and in reallife probably acts totally orthogonal to the crap he writes in general), then you really really need to be super-sound in all arguments. Be it the comparison to Weimar (and then kind of wanting to omit how Weimar in some ways, not all, but some, helped build up the Nazi idiots) or not knowing hexapdf ... I am sorry, but that means you failed at doing your prior research.

Personally I already find hexapdf to be better than prawn. And you can also try to convince the hexapdf author to improve hexapdf; he was willing to do so when he has time and the suggestion made sense.