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Discussion on: What’s your opinion on the Ruby programming language?

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John Colagioia (he/him)

I like and use it, but wish its initial burst of broad popularity had held on through the rise/expansion in tooling and libraries other language ecosystems had. Compared head-to-head with just the compiler or interpreter for other languages, it has a lot of conveniences. But comparing its ecosystem with a JavaScript that can add static type-checking, a pretty-printer, and treat style issues as if they were fatal errors, Ruby is harder to use for large-scale engineering than it could be. Python, JavaScript, and C# seem to have much more investment in their libraries and their flagship web application frameworks have mostly caught up to Ruby, as well.
But on "the other other hand," Ruby has also invested a lot more effort into making sure their community is sustainable, putting it far ahead of other languages in that respect.