... and I use Windows as my main OS, so I must be square! I'm not "worthy" of Ruby, and anything bad I have to say about Ruby just proves their point. Many articles I read have this condescending tone, this article being a prime example.
Even an article about why Ruby is not ideal for some scenarios is turned into a "you're wrong, Ruby is best" rant.
Where did you look? Could you introduce me to some of these people that made you feel stupid?
I've been doing ruby for a relatively short amount of time and I've found the community to be a hell of a lot nicer than most programming/technical communities. Where do I have to look to find these ruby assholes?
> The whole tone of this article is a good example, actually
Hold on there, don't extrapolate whatever shitty article makes it's way to HN or Reddit as a litmus test for a "community" (btw, putting "community" in quotes is pretty condescending in and of itself). This guy has no standing in the ruby community whatsoever. I don't know if he's a good developer or not, but his article is certainly sensationalistic and defensive and won't earn him any respect from any ruby devs I know.
If you were to judge every PL community by their most defensive blowhards then you wouldn't be a programmer at all, because every community will attract some proportion of ignorant coat-tail riders without the courage to confront the real issues of their ecosystem.
The Ruby community's biggest fault is a higher-than-average adherence to fashion, as annoying as that can be from a stability perspective, it's not an unmitigated failing because it means a genuinely good idea may catch on faster.
I'd be genuinely interested in seeing concrete examples of people held in regard in the ruby community who are respected in proportion to how rude they are. Matz, DHH, Avdi Grimm, Steve Klabnik, Yehuda Katz, Aaron Patterson etc. off the top of my head strike me as gratuitously nice human beings.
I don't think choosing a faster language is premature optimization. Java might be a bit more difficult to program in, but the performance is a lot better. Java is also easier to program in than c++. I think that is a good trade off. I'm not saying you should not use ruby, but not even considering something else seems stupid.
A lot of developers still develop software for Windows and telling them to install some UNIX variant instead of choosing a programming language just seems stupid. Not all of us are developing web applications. But even if we are there are lots of programming languages that work properly in both Windows and UNIX environments that offer the same advantages as ruby, Python or Groovy for example.
Could you provide some examples? The most respected Rubyists I can think of, even if I'm not particularly friendly with them myself, are notably nice and frequently go out of their way to help people.
It is trendy to join the pile on against the Ruby community but little evidence remains to be found for its validity.