You're right about that, and that's something I believe the Ruby team is struggling with, to show where Ruby is useful outside the Web field. Everyones picture of Ruby is web related thanks to Rails, there is no question about it.
And I find that bit sad because Ruby is also good at other things like building cli apps (have a look at Metasploit for example) & gluing different moving parts together, creating your own DSL thanks to its flexible language structure.
I wouldn't say Ruby is better than any other languge though, all general purpose language could probably achieve the same result, it's just a matter of taste.
We're venturing in the not exhaustively objectively proven benefits and virtues of strong static typing but nowadays I reach for Golang and not for shell scripts (or Ruby, or Python).
Why?
Just today I again had to do Homebrew cleanups so one recipe can install. Likely my fault, 100% sure about it, but I just need non-confusing tools in my life.
...Or I kept grooming my homemade cross-machine provisioning scripts (i.e. install baseline tools like git and a few others, and then bring my up entire environment along) and in the end it still couldn't source a script that is right there in the file system and even after I made sure it got sourced, it still couldn't find the stuff inside it... while all other 20+ such similar `source stuff.zsh` work just fine.
At one point you do get fed up. (And yes I know this is not strictly related to strong static typing; it's just one example of a thing that will reduce bug surface.)
Ruby is easy to write. And that's the problem. People tried to do too much with it. And it's early glory of including a gem that monkey-patches the core library APIs did not do it any favors either.
Nowadays I don't appreciate unbridled freedom as much. I appreciate and even enjoy constructive limitations. Truth is we can be very much like kids and should be protected from harming each other.
But yeah, that's venturing into philosophy which was not the topic.
TL;DR: Ruby is fine but is fairly limited for my taste. My needs are far bigger and they also include maximum 50ms of startup time.
>But yeah, that's venturing into philosophy which was not the topic.
I guess you touch on something why many of the discussions on HN and Internet fail to get the point across, when you could have someone in their 10s or 20s who couldn't understand it. Just like how we were told when we were young.
>Nowadays I don't appreciate unbridled freedom as much. I appreciate and even enjoy constructive limitations. Truth is we can be very much like kids and should be protected from harming each other.
It is unfortunate this line of fine balance thinking is not well understood by many, young or old.
