A much more level-headed person than I wrote an in-depth essay on why Ruby is not quite ready for prime time.
I was initially excited about Ruby on Rails. What got my attention was scaffolding. I’ve been told it’s a hack, but how can you not get excited when an application automagically knows when you add or substract fields from the database it’s pointing to?
But then RoR 2.0 came out, and scaffolding, as far as I could tell, was broken. Ok, maybe not entirely broken but…it might as well be. You see, now to scaffold, instead of just editing a config file to tell the application where the database is located, you have to actually go through some odd song and dance to have the initialization of the application construct the tables. At least, that’s what I gathered from the patchy documentation I could find on the issue.
It might seem like a petty fine line I’m drawing here, but think about it. Putting in a layer of complication in a process that was the reason so many people were fired up about RoR is the equivalent of Apple discarding its entire iPod line.
Sorry, Ruby. The magic is gone, but I’m hoping in a few years after you’ve matured we can have dinner and try again.