[hzhou321]

> Ruby is clever, it can be beautiful, but I've never seen a good codebase using it grow well without enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability.

I believe every good maintainable software needs an enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability.

Language need be general to be useful. Any language can create utterly unmaintainable code. If you shift "opinionated" into the language, it is less easy to write unmaintainable code, but it is also more difficult to write fitting maintainable code because that "opinionated" opinion may not best fit (and usually can't best fit) a specific application, a specific team, and a specific set of experience. On the other hand, if we shift "opinionated" to the programmer, the language inevitably need add more meta-programming ability or simply more ways to do the same/similar thing. The code can easily become unmaintainable under less experienced programmers who are not opinionated and aren't disciplined.

The current programming culture expect programmers to be commodities, thus favors opinionated languages and idiomatic code. I can easily imagine a shift in culture that favors experienced and opinionated and disciplined programmers, where different set of languages will be favored.

Today's software, once grow to certain size, are all quite unmaintainable.