Summary
There has been much praise for Ruby in recent times, but all technologies make tradeoffs. What are the actual pain points you've experienced using Ruby?

Last week I asked in this blog, What are your Java pain points, really? The discussion last week was fruitful, and this week I'd like to ask a similar question for Ruby. My question about Ruby pain points stems from my desire to make sure I understand the actual tradeoffs represented by Ruby, given that there seems to be some hype going around, especially surrounding Rails. One thing I admire about both Rails and Ruby is that they are well marketed. The ruby-lang.org site is very well done, and does a great job of getting curious programmers to try Ruby. And Rails has been expertly marketed with one simple message: it helps you write web apps fast by favoring convention over configuration. But my observation is that Rails in particular has been promoted by trumpeting its good points and downplaying its bad.

I have used Ruby in small scripts, and I like it. But I hope to hear this week from people who have built some pretty serious things with it. It is somehow hard to separate Rails from Ruby, but I'm not interested in hearing about Rails pain points. I'm really interested in understanding what pain points exist today in the general Ruby programming experience. What are your Ruby pain points, really? Please post your list of Ruby pain points in the discussion forum for this blog post.

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About the Blogger

Bill Venners is president of Artima, Inc., publisher of Artima Developer (www.artima.com). He is author of the book, Inside the Java Virtual Machine, a programmer-oriented survey of the Java platform's architecture and internals. His popular columns in JavaWorld magazine covered Java internals, object-oriented design, and Jini. Active in the Jini Community since its inception, Bill led the Jini Community's ServiceUI project, whose ServiceUI API became the de facto standard way to associate user interfaces to Jini services. Bill is also the lead developer and designer of ScalaTest, an open source testing tool for Scala and Java developers, and coauthor with Martin Odersky and Lex Spoon of the book, Programming in Scala.