So the argument is... "I dont like it", "It's dynamically typed" "Twitter crashed a decade and a half ago", "It's slow", and "It's only in top 20 on the yearly stackoverflow survey"
Do arguments even matter when the article is clearly clickbait? If the title is not enough to identify it as clickbait, the first 4 paragraphs make it clear, with the whole "imprinting" bit.
My first programming language was BASIC. My second programming language was assembly (for Z80A, then for 6502, later for x86). My third programming language, the one the author would call "formative" was Pascal.
None of these languages left me "imprinted" to the point of forever shaping my tastes and making me unable to adapt to or appreciate newer languages.
In fact, if we're talking about formative experiences, I remember one professor at the university who said, quite seriously, that "Anyone who has programmed in BASIC has been damaged for life and will never be a good programmer." The reason why that was a formative experience is that it taught me that people in which we put our trust can be assholes who ruin people's lives because they think some bit of dogmatic bullshit they came up with is clever.
And that's really what the article is about: the author wants to show off how clever they are. I'm okay with that, in general. I remember reading Steve Yegge's blog posts and finding them entertaining, regardless of whether I agreed with them. Thing is, Yegge had a lot more to say than just "look at how clever I am".
I don't think rewrite the in Scala was great decision, business wise. Fast forward 15 years its way lower on popularity than Ruby. Not sure what they use these days though.
I don't actually disagree but you could find similar criteria and write a similar piece for the vast majority of "professional" programming languages, including e.g. Python, JS, and C++, so this is kinda silly. "Computing is a pop culture" remains true, and the existence of this article in a magazine like Wired is a perfect example of that.
I mean to criticize Ruby and not mention dependency management (requisite global imports / requires)? You've got a fastball down the middle, but you're swinging at the dirt.
No, let's talk about an N=1 example of performance issues _from 15 years ago_, on version 1 of the language, where I'll bet my house that the biggest issue was poor usage of Rails ORM and architecture and not the Ruby language itself.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 29.8 ms ] threadMy first programming language was BASIC. My second programming language was assembly (for Z80A, then for 6502, later for x86). My third programming language, the one the author would call "formative" was Pascal.
None of these languages left me "imprinted" to the point of forever shaping my tastes and making me unable to adapt to or appreciate newer languages.
In fact, if we're talking about formative experiences, I remember one professor at the university who said, quite seriously, that "Anyone who has programmed in BASIC has been damaged for life and will never be a good programmer." The reason why that was a formative experience is that it taught me that people in which we put our trust can be assholes who ruin people's lives because they think some bit of dogmatic bullshit they came up with is clever.
And that's really what the article is about: the author wants to show off how clever they are. I'm okay with that, in general. I remember reading Steve Yegge's blog posts and finding them entertaining, regardless of whether I agreed with them. Thing is, Yegge had a lot more to say than just "look at how clever I am".
https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...
What a horrific piece of journalism. This reads like something a struggling journalist would put out after a few hours with ChatGPT.
My guess is the first Ruby codebase he worked on was a particularly bad codebase that didn't conform to Ruby standards.
No, let's talk about an N=1 example of performance issues _from 15 years ago_, on version 1 of the language, where I'll bet my house that the biggest issue was poor usage of Rails ORM and architecture and not the Ruby language itself.
Cool.