As of this writing, the grandparent was downvoted; this post is a response to that situation.
> Ruby sucks
Ruby actually does suck. I don't like it; that's my personal opinion.
But I can't say that. All the cool startups are using it, so Ruby has become one of HN's sacred cows: There are people on here, like the parent, who take offense when someone dares have anything but the highest praise for Ruby and Rails.
I've looked at Ruby. The syntax is ugly; the language is about as bad as Perl in this regard. I've deployed Ruby applications; it's complex (although, to be fair, this is endemic to Web development). Rails is a nightmare.
A lot of HN'ers seem to like it. That's fine. But we should listen to unpopular opinions; important truths aren't always immediately universally accepted as such.
Problem: Maybe Ruby is actually the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't understand its greatness because I haven't seen the right tutorial. Solution: Write a better tutorial, improve existing ones, or point out your favorite beginning Ruby tutorials on HN or your blog.
Problem: Maybe the syntax of Ruby is really what makes me uncomfortable. Solution: A Python-to-Ruby bridge would let people like me experience the goodness of Rails without the pain of learning Ruby's extensive syntactic "innovations."
Problem: The grandparent's employer was uncomfortable with the number of security vulnerabilities recently found in Rails. Solution: Maybe having a stable branch which didn't innovate quite as fast and focused on security would make enterprise users more comfortable with Rails. Or maybe the Rails community needs more thorough vetting of new features for potential security holes, perhaps through requiring separate reviews for security and functionality before patches are officially accepted.
But if we just dismiss anyone who criticizes Ruby as a troll, how are we supposed to recognize and respond to actual problems like these? The grandparent's issues were a legitimate criticism of Ruby, and should not have been downvoted.