[throwanem]

If I found myself defending a language by comparison with Perl, I'd be nervous. I worked in that language for most of a decade, and there are many reasons why I refuse ever to touch it again for longer than required to write a shell oneliner.

I didn't work with Ruby for nearly as long as that, not least because I found it to share too many of the same problems. I understand why the few people who deeply appreciate it do so, and I don't really judge them for that, but a wider and less partial perspective is also needed.

Then, too, nothing here actually defends Ruby's design per se. That nothing better could be expected at the time is really as close as we get, but as I discussed in more detail on another branch of the thread, contemporaneous Javascript suffices to dispose of that claim. That there are less well designed languages than Ruby I freely grant, but that's also not much of a defense.

[vidarh]

In 43 years of programming, it's by far the most readable of the several dozen languages I've used.

That I routinely can convert code from other languages and end up with something far smaller and more readable is another major plus.

That is all I need to defend its design.

[tetha]

I'm not even defending ruby too much. I used ruby for many years and it always felt somewhat off.

However, with the brevity of original comment, it feels like Ruby is getting a lot of flak for shaky design decisions.

While in reality, a lot of languages from that period had very shaky design decisions. Newer generations of languages or better versions of these languages - built upon the lessons of that period - avoid these mistakes and put the spotlight on these "obvious" design issues.