I love ruby - but surely it's closer to Perl and "There's more than one way to do it" - than python which generally strives for "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."?
The Rails apps I’ve programmed with LLMs seem to work a LOT better than arbitrary python or ruby or JavaScript apps. I chalk that up to “there are a gazillion examples of omiauth in Rails that the LLM can’t really stray off the path. It just works.”
That means I let the agent do things the way it wants to, not because I have a preference. So we’re using turbo and Hotwire and whatever it is it’s doing. And I’m using React for some other problems. Not because I know React, but because the LLM does.
In golf it is said to “let the club do the work”. Over control leads to disaster. Same with LLMs. Not saying let it do whatever but if there are widely baked in conventions you’ll be far better off letting those do the work.
I tried to run a Ruby script recently and got an error about Fixnum. Apparently they made some breaking change to how integer types are referenced in version 3. I had to modify the script to get it to work on a modern parser. How is this not equivalent to the Python 2-3 jump? I don't know the first thing about Ruby but this already told me that it's a language with breaking changes between versions.
(It was the ruby scripts here if anyone is curious: https://github.com/haberman/vtparse/ )
The same way triping on a small pothole is not the same as falling into a giant sinkhole.
The claim was not that Ruby had no incompatible changes whatsoever.
Correct in that Ruby never had a schism and is still massively productive and wideley deployed (e.g. Shopify + Stripe alone represent billions/trillions of dollars through Ruby hotpaths).
Python's general lack of success in this domain is telling and embodies whats I was trying to communicate in the article -- languages with low entropy in syntax, features, ecosystem, and toolchain compound slowly.
I doubt Python is significantly better.
The problem isn't that there's more than one way to write working code.
It's that there's infinite ways to write working code, and nearly all of them are bad, and any dynamically typed language allows for a lot of type slop that you don't want.
There's a lot more opportunity for LLMs to write terrible working code in Ruby or Python than there is in Rust, for example.