Is it just me, or did “framewar” hell break lose this September? Cedric Otaku calls Obie Fernandez a Rails bigot. Obie, perhaps in jest, ticks people off. Then realizing the error of his ways, attributes it to humor. Obie, surprisingly gets a decent, objective response from Daniel Spiewak. Daniel, weary of Ruby community’s reactions, clarifies his “self-avowed Rubyism”.
Point #9 in Daniel’s post caught my eye. I have two colleagues of mine, one is a die-hard Rubyist, the other is a Perl/PHP coder (Perl for fun, PHP for profit). When they asked me how I think Ruby compares to Perl, this was essentially my response:
Ok, admit it, Ruby’s syntax is complex. If you don’t think so, then you don’t know the language as well as you think you do. All that DSL goodness comes at a price. Flexibility is hard to build into a language, and as a result Ruby has all sorts of weird constructs and cryptic tricks required to get things done.
— Daniel Spiewak on Ruby vs. Java