I don't know what it is about Ruby that turns every HN thread that mentions it into a flame war about how it's not the perfect language. People don't do this with other languages. What gives?
Discussions about C devolve into a religious war about simplicity and portability vs safety and an inadequate standard library.
Discussions about C++ devolve into a religious war about memory safety, bloat, developer competency, UB, and more.
Discussions about Haskell devolve into a religious war about powerful type systems and language constructs vs performance concerns, development complexity, and "endofunctors, lol."
Discussions about JS devolve into a religious war about npm, web dev in general, "== vs === lol" and more.
Discussions about Rust... oh boy.
In my experience, most discussions of specific components of languages inevitably spill into these broad and neverending religious wars.
Discussions about Go devolve into a religious war about simplicity and portability vs "the creators of the language said its only for dum dums and it shows", "it took them 10+ years to get generics", and more.
Discussion about Zig devolve into a religious war about living in a universe where C exists and not wanting to write it versus "there's too many C-likes", "why isn't this Rust", and more.
Discussions about Erlang devolve into a religious war about standing up fault tolerant and scalable distributed systems, Joe was the nicest guy ever vs "you can do that in X all you have to do is Y".
Discussions about Elixir devolve into a religious war about Erlang and Ruby's love child, José Valim is the nicest guy ever versus "you can do that in X all you have to do is Y", "but what about types" and more.
Discussions about Clojure devolve into a religious war about people writing impressive programs in their spare time, "I actually get paid to write Clojure" versus "does anyone actually get paid to write Clojure".
Discussions about Elm devolve into a religious war about type safety and staying sane versus Richard Feldman lost his temper once, the 0.19 release and "everyone has Stockholm syndrome over there".
Discussions about V devolve into a religious war about "this is not a scam" versus "this is a scam".
Discussions about Nim generally don't, or the language creator is going off on D-forums / Twitter / X again.
You can see that in Go. It was a hugely hyped language, backed by Google, but without a lot of wishlist items that C++/Java/Python/Ruby/etc developers would have liked.
You can see that with Rust. There is the “rewrite everything in rust” crowd, which inspires anti-rust people to speak up.
I find it crazy how much criticism Rust, Go, Ruby, etc receive when Python has such glaring flaws. From the 2-to-3 migration, to package management. The consensus seems to be that’s just the cost of doing business.
By the way, I’m a Python developer. I don’t hate Ruby. But it seems like most Ruby fans love the elegance and consistency of its design, whereas that never resonated with me. E.g calling obj.length rather then len(obj) is surely more elegant. I never really cared though?
I guess I just find it interesting how some languages cons are excused while others aren’t. And how people can be drawn to some languages while others hate them.