I don't even know Ruby, but it's clear that the idea that Ruby is an "amazingly primitive" language that people are using instead of Haskell because it has existing libraries and services or because "startups are not technical" is drastically wrong and almost insulting. To the contrary, Ruby, probably more than any other language, has a large community that's highly enthusiastic about its programming style and culture, which is the reason most of those libraries and ecosystems were created in the first place. I know this is just a few bullet points, but vaguely mentioning a few (good) reasons to evangelize Haskell (plus a motorcycle) along with three seemingly random relatively small issues as criticisms of Ruby (plus a horse and wagon) distorts reality almost to the point of unrecognizability.
Compared to GHC, MRI really is primitive. Parts of this are intentional: the object model is intentionally simple, and one of the design goals was to keep unixy goodness close to the surface, so the IO model, forking and so on are quite shallow shim layers over the system calls.
Other parts, like the threading, the GC, and the parser (oh god, the parser) are suffering from baggage that's never had GHC-levels of academic effort thrown at it.
To the contrary, Ruby, probably more than any other language, has a large community
that's highly enthusiastic about its programming style and culture, which is the reason
most of those libraries and ecosystems were created in the first place. I know this is just
a few bullet points, but vaguely mentioning a few (good) reasons to evangelize Haskell
(plus a motorcycle) along with three seemingly random relatively small issues as
criticisms of Ruby (plus a horse and wagon) distorts reality almost to the point of
unrecognizability
The presentation is making the point that MRI itself is primitive, and addresses the plus points of the community in the very next slide. For people who care about the implementation underlying their code as much as they care about their own code (or more), MRI's shortcomings are a visible downside.
> I don't even know Ruby, but it's clear that the idea that Ruby is X is drastically wrong and almost insulting.
That's a pretty big assertion to make for any non-trivial value of X. Let me try and break it down a little more.
He's spot on about CoW, this is a similarly big issue for memory consumption of long running perl applications (though in our case because of caching things in the value struct).
Lexical scoping ... after years of lisp and perl I find that any language that lacks that feels horribly primitive, to be entirely honest.
Concurrency ... hahahahaha oh dear. He should've played with the coroutine stuff before claiming events were the -only- way, but they're certainly the default way for a lot of dynamic languages, and they're definitely better for low level plumbing than high level code. Functional Reactive Programming approaches are amazingly nicer once you get the hang of them.
So - from those axes, yes, it's amazingly primitive.
You seem to be complaining that he didn't -mention- the community? He was trying to contrast; Haskell also has a thriving community so short of trying to get into a community DSW I don't see why he'd mention that.
All the rubyists I know would readily agree that, on the axes that he's referring to, ruby is far more primitive than haskell; and I think they'd also agree that a lot of current ruby adoption is about the ecosystem rather than the language and community, even though -they- personally are mostly more interested in the latter.
I do, however, think he should have dropped those slides even so; I knew as I was reading it that they'd provoke the counterproductive (from his POV) reaction that you've exemplified in a sufficient percentage of the audience to be not worth it.
I think he is referring to the implementation of MRI. First of all, its not as primitive as some people make it and second, there are multiple alternatives that gave a lot of thought to how to fix all the problems of MRI (JRuby, Rubinius).
