Ruby

So why is your opinion so general? Do you consider literally every feature of Ruby to be designed as wrongly as possible, so that no similarity at all is acceptable when making a new language? Even if that's the case, you could still use Ruby as an example of what not to do, and then that counts as "inspiration." Mind you, the result would be pretty crazy. I'd expect the feature list to include "instructions are always executed last to first" and "the syntax has no matching bracket pairs" and the like.

Or maybe you know Ruby only by reputation, and you consider it some kind of poisonous meme whose unbridled ravages can turn a normal human brain into a mnemorrheic shitstorm whose major symptoms include uncanny obsessions with Red Bull and electric guitars. Many hapless code cowboys once dear to you were lost overnight after only the briefest perusal of a book bound in human skin and adorned with an unholy pickaxe, and to this day you dare not utter the R word in more than a whisper for fear you'll invoke the dark lords of the forge and have the skin flayed from your bones.

I really hope it's the latter.

>>12
I'm not gonna come right out and say that the community is ``Terrible!'' but it's truly a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the RAD obsession means that you can implement an interesting idea overnight... and more importantly, if someone else doesn't like how you did it, they can make a better version the next day. On the other hand, this means that assholes and total morons can (and do) contribute just as much as people who actually have "professionalism" in their vocabulary. Rails is a fine example of both of these.

You could make a Lisp dialect that does RAD as well as Ruby, but then you'd just have the same morons/assholes from Rubyland using a different language, so this is a really bad idea. Besides, I think the Haskell guys figured out a better way: Use a language with a high barrier of entry and cultivate a respect for abstract thought and academia, but build RAD infrastructure and promote that as the core virtue of your language/community. You get all the benefits of Ruby and none of the riffraff.

This is a bad post.