[MichaelGG]

The main benefit of Ruby seems to be the ability to catch method names and treat them as an argument. I bought "Metaprogramming in Ruby", and the author seems delighted that you can do "mycvsrow.columnname". Several other people have confirmed to me that it is really just being able to drop off quotes around what would otherwise be strings in other languages. I don't get it, at all. Maybe it's a knee-jerk reaction to verbose languages like Java. But I fail to see what Ruby offers over a Haskell or F#-like.

I got excited by seeing how passionate and excited people like patio11 were about Rails. But then seeing how Rails prefers insecure defaults and had exploits because they were essentially eval'ing user posted data really hampered my enthusiasm.

Seeing articles like this reinforces the idea that Ruby is cowboy programming, just making stuff up as they go along. Like PHP but with class.