Hacker news is an interesting place.
Today I saw an article about the superiority of Ruby over Javascript ecosystem when it comes to tooling simplicity. The points made by the author make sense to me. They are almost too familiar — I spent my latest creative hour on comparisons of several javascript… storage approaches? (like a database wasn’t good enough). On the other hand Ruby with Rails framework in the centre, has only one particular tool for each job, so you won’t waste time on preoptimizing your tech stack even before you wrote a single line of code. I was sold and decided to put (Ruby on) Rails onto my backlog.
Half a day later I saw another article about Ruby. This time the main theme was that Rails is to Ruby what a Cracow dialect is to Polish language. Interesting, huh? I learned that Ruby on Rails community loves monkey-patching and it’s a source of serious problems for the authors of Ruby libraries. Apparently Rails is powered mainly by the ActiveSupport library which extends every builtin type. Because it gets the special treatment as the “unofficial stdlib” it’s hard to write other libraries. You either add more patches and hope that there will be no clashes between the libraries or you propose a different paradigm, which is then rejected by the community so used to the Rails conventions. Well, it does not sound like the ecosystem is easily extendable and when you try to do something more complex (like Shopify it gets much harder.
Even though these two articles at first seem like arguments for and against Ruby, they actually agree on the single premise, that you should do the things in a very particular way. All the way. Hard for me to say whether it’s appealing to me or not. Maybe I’ll give it a try one day.