> I've seldom run into a programming language and ecosystem that tries so hard to make programming mirthful.
Perl felt like that in the 90s. Ruby (not Rails) seemed like it was trying to do a better Perl - better OO, better functional style, better syntax, etc. Both of them inspired a lot of things in other languages. And lots of people groan and complain about both of them today.
From what I can tell, a lot of complaints are from people who don't really like to code. Expressiveness means choice and that means thinking about coding instead of just following a "one way to do it" pattern over and over. Thoughtful coding, making something unique and making it easier than other examples, is also the kind of coding that LLMs can't do - they only munge together mediocrity out of what exists.
> From what I can tell, a lot of complaints are from people who don't really like to code. Expressiveness means choice and that means thinking about coding instead of just following a "one way to do it" pattern over and over. Thoughtful coding, making something unique and making it easier than other examples...
The complaints are from the poor suckers who had to maintain that "mirthful" code after it was written. Writing greenfield code is already fun in most languages; understanding existing code is already the hard part, and having to decode the "unique" thoughts of whoever came before you makes it worse.
when Ruby was up and coming, people compared it to Perl a lot, but I never saw the similarities. I guess they both have first-class regexp. But ruby has very standard semantics, almost interchangeable with Python and Javascript in most cases. Perl… like, I would have to look up “how to access a nested array” because its sigils, arrows, and types form such an alien system
Ruby shares command-line options with Perl, the use of sigils, many of the single character globals. Besides Smalltalk Perl is probably the biggest influence on Ruby, but the Perl influence is more superficial.
IIRC, the comparisons were because Ruby was supposed to be a fully object oriented 'perl-like' language. Even the name was a nod to its Perl based inspiration.
Perl felt like that in the 90s. Ruby (not Rails) seemed like it was trying to do a better Perl - better OO, better functional style, better syntax, etc. Both of them inspired a lot of things in other languages. And lots of people groan and complain about both of them today.
From what I can tell, a lot of complaints are from people who don't really like to code. Expressiveness means choice and that means thinking about coding instead of just following a "one way to do it" pattern over and over. Thoughtful coding, making something unique and making it easier than other examples, is also the kind of coding that LLMs can't do - they only munge together mediocrity out of what exists.