[rauljara]

I'll bite.

Ruby has a beautiful and consistent object / module system, a beautiful integration of functional and object oriented programming paradigms, and extreme powerful metaprogramming. All of those things are pretty wrapped up in its design philosophy which contains a whole bunch more than developer happiness.

Yes, Ruby has warts. So do all the other languages you listed. It is helpful to be able to see both the good and bad in languages and not get hung up battling them against each other.

[MustardTiger]

Ruby essentially has no module system, and it only offers awkward tacked on support for small bits of functional programming. Hardly an integration of FP and OOP at all, much less a beautiful one.

[catnaroek]

> Ruby has a beautiful and consistent object / module system,

I don't program much with objects, so I don't know what to expect from them, but after programming in a language that treats modules seriously (Standard ML), I can't accept anything less than the following from anything that calls itself a “module system”:

(0) Implementor-side abstraction: Fine-grained control over which implementation details are exposed to different parts of a program.

(1) Client-side abstraction: The ability to define a module as a function of another, yet to be supplied, module.

Ruby's “module system” doesn't quite cut it.

> a beautiful integration of functional and object oriented programming paradigms

Functional programming in Ruby is possible, but a gigantic pain:

(0) Partially applied functions are mildly inconvenient.

(1) Higher-order functions that recursively pass themselves a modified version of their function argument(s) are not so mildly inconvenient.

(2) Now imagine actually debugging such beasts when you make a mistake. Unit tests don't help because they overemphasize the concrete cases, when higher-order functions are all about abstracting as much as possible.

At a more fundamental level, functional programming is value-oriented, and programming with compound values (not the same thing as compound objects) in Ruby isn't the path of least resistance, to put it mildly.

> Yes, Ruby has warts. So do all the other languages you listed.

I wasn't commenting on the languages themselves, but rather the philosophy of their designers. C++ has more than “warts” - the language as a whole is a monstrous abomination, but the philosophy of not accepting unneeded performance overheads is aesthetically pleasing IMO.