Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language"

What “humans matter” means in Ruby

• Ruby is described as prioritizing programmer ergonomics: readable, natural-language-like syntax and “delightful” APIs.
• Supporters frame this as centering the human experience of writing and reading code, not just formal design principles.
• Skeptics push back that all languages try to be humane; Ruby’s claim to uniqueness here feels overstated or condescending.

Joy, “magic,” and ergonomics

• Many recall Ruby/Rails as a revelation versus early-2000s Java/J2EE boilerplate: very fast from zero to working app.
• Others report Ruby (especially Rails) feeling “magical” in a bad way: hidden behavior, method_missing, monkeypatching, DSLs that obscure control flow and types.
• Several say Ruby is joyful for small programs, but painful to maintain at scale or in messy, contractor-heavy codebases.

Ruby vs Rails and usage domains

• Multiple comments stress that Rails ≠ Ruby; much of the negative experience comes from large Rails apps, not the core language.
• Ruby has been used for system tools, scripting, DevOps (e.g., Chef), static site generators, game engines, music tools, etc., though the public image is “web framework only.”
• Some say Rails’ huge success both popularized Ruby and pigeonholed it as a “web-only, legacy Rails” language.

“Seriousness,” business value, and scaling

• The Wired piece is widely seen as rage-bait that never defines “serious,” implicitly equating it with static typing, speed, and infinite scalability.
• Many note Ruby has powered major companies and paid careers for decades; that alone makes “unserious” a strange label.
• Twitter’s scaling issues are contested: critics use it as evidence Ruby “doesn’t scale,” others argue Ruby was crucial to initial success and that most products never hit those limits.

Safety, maintainability, and types

• Concerns raised: dynamic typing, hard-to-track mutations, difficulty refactoring large codebases, historical lack of thread-safe gems, tricky shared state and immutability.
• Some argue Ruby encourages dangerous patterns; others counter that similar bugs exist in any language and that misuse, not Ruby, is the real problem.
• There’s interest in Ruby-like but statically-typed options (Scala, Crystal, Elixir) and in better optional typing for Ruby; others are tired of “type hype” and defend dynamic languages.

Language comparisons and ecosystem shifts

• Python is repeatedly cited as having “won” the broader ecosystem (data science, ML, general scripting), while Ruby remains strong mainly in web apps.
• Elixir/BEAM gets heavy praise for operational characteristics (concurrency, observability, fault tolerance) while retaining some Ruby-like friendliness.
• Go, Rust, C++, Java, Kotlin, etc. are discussed as tradeoff points: less magic, more explicitness and safety, but often less “joy.”

AI and the fading of language wars?

• A side thread argues that with AI-assisted coding, stylistic language battles feel increasingly archaic; tooling choices may matter less for many developers.
• Others strongly disagree, emphasizing that runtime behavior, ecosystems, and maintainability still depend heavily on language, and AI often just generates more code that humans must debug.