[brightball]

I can speak from both sides of it now.

When I first took on a project that was written in Ruby I was extremely annoyed. Once I learned my way around and really understood it better, I loved it. It's still my go-to for just about everything just because of how productive and readable it is.

The performance optimizer in me fights a constant inner battle about the fastest way to do things vs the most productive way to do them. With more time and experience, productivity wins just about every time.

I'm also a huge fan of Elixir and it's always interesting to watch the language discussions because there are people who are absolute "static typing is the only way" zealots out there. I don't use zealots lightly either. Preference is one thing. "Any other way is wrong" is entirely another. Elixir gives you a different way of achieving the same thing with strong typing, pattern matching, guard clauses and type inference via symbols...but it's still not enough for the static typing crowd, no matter how perfect the balance of concerns.

When you find your language, enjoy it. There's always going to be people who find a reason to dislike your choice because it wasn't their choice.

[vidarh]

I used to be firmly towards the zealot side of that. Until I tried Ruby and my first experience was cutting down a 7k line piece of code to 10% of that while adding functionality, and it just turned out the typing was much less of an issue.

I'd love to see some improved typing support in Ruby, but it's gone from a "the world will fall without it" to something that'd be a minor nice to have and which doesn't need to be complete.

[eliseshaffer]

I totally agree about productivity. It's one of those things where focusing on it really improves your outcomes.

[brightball]

Exactly. There's no language that comes close to Ruby on the productivity front. At least none that I've found yet.