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.

>>14
Look at it this way. What community doesn't have jerks in it? For that matter, how many otherwise decent people won't act like jerks if they've had a bad enough day? You can apply expertise and take steps to promote your signal to noise ratio going forward, but you can't eliminate the noise altogether.

I take a pragmatic view of this issue. Since you're gonna have jerks no matter what, it's better for them to be harmless idiots talking about harmless nonsense than productive people who you have to deal with on a daily basis because they built the whole platform you're working with. Rubyists constantly get away with being douchebags in an otherwise productive environment. The goal (my goal, not yours) is simply to discourage people from being douchebags while they're productive. Then they can go home and masturbate into the garbage disposal for all I care.