[krainboltgreene]

Wow, that's an insanely brilliant thump against Ruby and the community.

As a born Rubyist (That is I started programming with Ruby) hopefully this article will get enough traction to make people start looking into having Ruby be as easy as it should be to start with.

[mechanical_fish]

I wouldn't call it "brilliant"; it's a rant. Not that there's anything wrong with rants. This is a frustrating moment in Rails history, a two-fold version transition; a little cursing is to be expected.

Ruby is transitioning to 1.9. Rails is transitioning to version 3. These things are always painful. Some platforms try to rip off the band aid; others try to step slowly and carefully from one version to another. Then there are the platforms that just stop shipping new versions for a decade or so.

It's not unique to Ruby. The Drupal community is struggling to transition to Drupal 7, while legacy sites must negotiate the transition from Drupal 5 or Drupal 4.x, as well as the PHP 5.2/5.3 transition (or even a transition from PHP4), and the MySQL 5.0/5.1 transition -- or maybe the future of MySQL is MariaDB or Drizzle, or maybe we should pay more attention to good old Postgres, and then there's the team that insists that MongoDB is the future.

The web evolves. It is barely old enough to vote. It is unlike anything we have had before. If you don't like negotiating a blizzard of loosely-connected impermanent pieces you need to work on something else.

Or you need a better strategy. Many of the complaints in this rant are self-inflicted. Pick one text editor and stick with it. Pick one database and stick with it. Pick the Ruby version that DHH uses and stick with it. Don't agonize over every option. There are lots of ways to build a web page, and almost all of them work.

[mrinterweb]

You hit the nail on the head. The simultaneous push from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 and the upgrade of Rails from 2 to 3 is ripe for turbulence. Rails 3 is a major upgrade and the supporting gems also need to simultaneously be upgraded as well. This upgrade is no small feat.

[gamache]

Then there are the platforms that just stop shipping new versions for a decade or so.

Perl's mistake was not releasing another Camel Book for a decade. The Perl 5.x language and libraries have done just fine.

[chromatic]

Don't mistake a publisher's problem for a language's problem.

[gamache]

I understand that, but it took the Perl community years to step up and fill the gap. (Thanks BTW.)

The publisher's problem became the community's problem, which in turn became the language's problem.

[dasil003]

Ruby is a hacker's paradise. The reason things are so chaotic is because people are doing so many cool things independently. It's impossible for someone to step in and impose order for the benefit of beginners, and even if it were possible it would diminish the value of Ruby.

The greatest opportunity for improvement is in the documentation arena, since blog posts are a huge part of the Rails documentation ecosystem, and because they tend to go stale and clog up Google with misinformation. Rails Guides are a really nice addition, but a meta-source that provided staleness information and list of preferred resources for various things would go a long way towards guiding newbies to a sane stating point (hmm, wheels turning in head).