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All accusations towards Ruby are just ridiculous and are factually inaccurate! It is important that as a community we debunk these myths and unjustified criticisms. An even better road to take would be to provide examples of how computationally complex problems can be dealt with efficiently in Ruby, highlighting the best practices and the existing workarounds.
A religious community is emotionally easy to attack and may produce inopportune responses in defense of whatever has been questioned. Over the past three years I’ve heard a few bad things about Ruby and I’ve seen all sorts of responses, which in some cases were simply overreactions.
Ruby is a wonderfully designed language. The Ruby and Ruby on Rails communities have a lot of passion. We love our language, created by a very cool guy (and maestro of humbleness) in Japan. We love our framework authored by a Danish GAP model, and we really enjoy the spirit in the community. We have the best non-paid marketing department in the world. We started the revolution which is powering most of the new social websites out there.
Ruby on Rails is the single most important and valuable technical solution, language and tool for software problems.
It is amusing to watch people attempt to tear apart and deconstruct Ruby, trying to refute its benefits, while Ruby coders continue on their merry way creating incredible software. To really appreciate Ruby, you need to have hands on experience with it, not just read a few anti-blogs or look at a few biased benchmarks. What people have achieved using Ruby with so little effort is not the result of a hero programming approach, but the fruit of Ruby's flawless design.
You can program Fortran in any language. Nearly every new, unfamiliar language is going to seem inadequate in comparison to a familiar one. The things familiar language do well may often be done badly in Ruby, or simply use strange, unintuitive idioms. For example, you could abuse the GOTO statement. You have to live the language for a little while. You have to get advice from people who know Ruby well. You have to progress beyond the surface. You have to explore its strengths. Right now, all you can credibly comment on are the things that look good and the things that you don't understand. You may very well be right about some you say. However, you would only be right by coincidence, a lucky guess; you cannot know that you're right. You haven't done the work.
Every language has its warts, though, so in order to fairly evaluate those you need to get past the warts and actually look at Ruby itself. You certainly could implement any part of Ruby in Java, but that doesn't mean that Ruby isn't useful. That there are those who are happy and productive with Ruby definitely means you should look deeper before dismissing it.