Why Ruby?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:iduqor$1kj0$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> One is, the talk starts with this extreme syntax exegesis where the 
> position of literally every space and every letter matters a lot, and how 
> exactly one choice for each is perfect and no other. Then a large part of 
> the talk is dedicated to more or less successful metaphors and comparisons 
> centered on freedom. This to me amounts to a guy who would want the 
> freedom to smoke pot, but would beat his wife if she didn't align the 
> towels on the bathroom rack.
>

I've been using Ruby (with Rake) for roughly a year to manage the build 
process of a fairly complex (in terms of number of different 
tools/languages/technologies/etc involved) server/client web app. While 
there are nice things about it, I think your description of it is exactly 
on-the-mark.

I can definitely see in Ruby how the designer was trying for a "natural 
language/thought-process" feel, but it just ends up feeling 
sloppily-designed. I never feel completely confident that what I write is 
actually going to get parsed as I intended. It's like playing with voodoo, 
especially when you toss in the syntax-tricks that idiomatic-Rake uses. It 
certainly gets the job done for what I'm using it for, but if there was a 
DRake, I'd be using it instead.