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Comment by Draiken | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is somewhat prevalent in the Ruby community as of late where people try as hard as possible to "lock down" the language and limit the ways you can get to a solution in the name of the proverbial "ease of understanding".

I wholeheartedly disagree and believe we should instead grow the developers to understand these different approaches as opposed to labeling half of the language "bad practice".

As I said in another comment. Ruby was built to have multiple ways of doing the same tasks and criticizing it for this is... pointless.

Yes people can create monstrosities with all of these variations, but that's true with any powerful tool. If you dislike Ruby for being Ruby, pick another language.

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I love an expressive programming language, it’s why Go makes me feel like I’m brushing my teeth with sandpaper…

But there’s such a thing as too much flexibility, expressiveness and flexibility often go hand in hand as flexible language lets you make things as expressive as you want… but things can be expressive without the same level of flexibility if they are well designed.

I find Rust strikes a good balance for low level language work, it feels more expressive than C because of higher level language features but it’s not necessarily as flexible as C with things like the borrow checker nagging you to be safe unless you turn it off.

Lisp… too flexible, too expressive. Lisp code reminds me of the phrase “that depends on what the definition of is, is”.

Scheme and scheme likes including weird step cousins like JavaScript share the unfortunate result of this and your drowning in custom DSLs and no one quite codes the same way unless you have rigorous tooling to enforce a team style.

Ruby falls foul of this for me too. It’s too flexible, it’s very expressive and I enjoyed reading the tutorials and learning the basics. But the moment I discovered real code I was immediately recoiling in horror …. It was a disaster… a spaghetti mess of overrides redefining and meta-programming in general. It made it impossible for me to ever trust the environment I coded it since I had to constantly inspect everything to make sure someone hadn’t done something crazy like enhanced the “+” sign to transform numbers to strings for avoiding something like a sql injection risk in a specific context and whoopsie, leaked the behaviour globally so now any time you added integers you got concatenated strings… but only after the library was dynamically loaded on first query … maddening stuff…

Stuff like this is why ruby is too flexible.

I do not program in Ruby as there was no business need but I have rough idea on what it can do. My view on the horror you've encountered is that the so called "programmers" that produce such abominations should be sent back to school.

I understand business idea of having monkeys producing code for cheap but I think this approach is misguided.

> we should instead grow the developers to understand these different approaches as opposed to labeling half of the language "bad practice".

> As I said in another comment. Ruby was built to have multiple ways of doing the same tasks and criticizing it for this is... pointless.

Agreed 100% with this take. If I only wanted 1 way to accomplish something no matter how inelegant it might be in that context, I would use Python. I choose Ruby specifically because of how expressive it is. It makes it a bit tougher when working in a team with 2 or more opinionated devs, ie. "should we use more functional or more OO approaches to solve a problem" but this is a culture and communication issue, not a language problem. Having a good rubocop setup and staying within the confines of your agreed upon ruleset is a good start.

For example you can use rubocop to enforce dissallowing `unless !condition`, then it's just not an issue anymore - these kinds of issues dissapear before code even makes it to review.

>"As I said in another comment. Ruby was built to have multiple ways of doing the same tasks and criticizing it for this is... pointless. Yes people can create monstrosities with all of these variations, but that's true with any powerful tool. If you dislike Ruby for being Ruby, pick another language."

Exactly the reasons I use C++. Well, after crazy performance, efficiency and single executable deployment.

I like C++ because I find angle brackets to be harmonious to the eye.

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