Good article raganwald.

I'm just learning RoR and I guess my biggest hangup is the prodigious use of colons.

I admire your ability to "rewrite code for Ruby"...

For me it's tough enough to learn one language. There is no way that I would ever attempt anything but a greenfield application with RoR and to finish that I will probably need some help. What attracted me to the language was the impression I got from reviewing descriptive materials from DHH and the 37 signals crew that Ruby has a great deal of elegance when it comes to interacting with databases. And, for me anyways, that's the only kind of elegance I'm really interested in because I think that's where the money is going to be. So far I'm not really good enough with the syntax to say whether it's going to live up to expectations but I haven't really seen anything yet that would cause me to say I've made a mistake in choosing this platform.

Blocks may not be able to genuinely accept blocks in Ruby, but I was able to get something pretty close: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...

To my eyes, Ruby as a language looked a lot like an internal IT app that is built as an aggregation of features. There might be a wonderful, coherent design in the implementation that I can’t see, but the interface I use seems like a bunch on one-off features that don’t play well together.

Huh? Is this guy talking about Perl? Is he talking about the same Ruby I know? His criticisms don't make any sense. Ruby is well-organized and well thought-out. It's not without its flaws, but it has far fewer than Java or Perl. Hell, Ruby makes Perl look like Java.

(If he hates Ruby this much, I'd hate to imagine what he'd think of the gigantic featuritis-striken kludge called Java or J2EE.)

Who cares? It isn't like you and ruby are getting married.

If you have a project that ruby seems like a decent fit, use it. You'll get nowhere are learn nothing without actually doing.