[Indy9000]

What makes Ruby so irreplaceable? Why struggle to make it something it's not when you could pick an existing statically typed language and build your system? Also how is Ruby a safe language for financial transactions when an engineer can hijack a running process and change memory without leaving a trace

[jameskilton]

What makes millions of lines of code and decades of knowledge irreplaceable?

Is there any language or ecosystem that can protect against a rogue employee?

[fmakunbound]

> hijack a running process and change memory without leaving a trace

Doesn't sound like a Ruby problem.

[Indy9000]

No but, Ruby makes it trivial. No decompilations, no assembly, no debuggers necessary. Drop into an irb in a running process, change stuff and get out in seconds

[viraptor]

Compilation is not a security control. Also if you're handling transactions at a significant rate, PCI (with all its problems) makes sure there's a trace.

[vinceguidry]

> drop into an irb in a running process

This is a thing?

[zeckalpha]

It also is a thing in most other languages, including C, Python, Java, Erlang, ...

[vinceguidry]

I'm not so sure. You can certainly attach a debugger to any running process. But that's not what parent was suggesting. He was saying anyone could attach a REPL. That's a totally different animal.

It's your own dumb fault if you expose the web-console or similar on production.