Quibble the first: a language is not a framework. Python and Ruby may be "opinionated" in some sense, but they are not opinionated frameworks. The article's complaints about Ruby in particular...
> It dives deeply into the concept of convention-over-configuration, and in doing so, creates a lot of behind the scenes magic that requires a lot of pre-knowledge before using or understanding it well; the true knowledge of its syntax and its behaviors feels more tribalistic to a set of esoteric elders who have taken the time to read the documentation, but is not necessarily friendly to casual beginners.
...are very clearly complaints about Rails. There's a waggish nod to that ("one could say it has gone off the rails"), but convention over configuration and behind-the-scenes magic are attributes of Rails, the framework, not Ruby, the language.
I've noticed this confusion before, to be fair, but it's an important distinction. As someone who genuinely likes Rails but loves Ruby as a scripting language, there are times I think it may have been the worst thing to happen to Ruby. (Well, the second worst, behind Ruby version managers, but I digress.)
Quibble the second: "Linux distros are not opinionated, quite the opposite, with each distro expressing itself slightly differently." I believe you could call those different expressions opinions. :) This little footnote on OSes conflates "opinionated" with "locked in," and while we all may have different definitions of "lock in," those things are not equivalent.
Sadly, Rails pretty much is Ruby at this point. I don't think I've heard a company use Ruby for anything other than Rails in like a decade. If they are, it's because they're already all in on Rails, so they might as well keep it in the same language :\
One quite interesting use of Ruby outside of Rails was its inclusion as the scripting language in various versions of RPG Maker, a popular piece of game creation software. The developers of the software are Japanese, like Yukihiro Matsumoto, and I gather Ruby is used in broader situations in Japan than Rails.
I see Ruby used pretty frequently in small parts of larger systems. I looked at a customer’s project last week and they were using Ruby to parse incoming e-mail.
The other somewhat significant use of Ruby that you may have heard of is Puppet. Much less in vogue for infrastructure as code these days but still useful for e.g. managing corporate fleets of Linux laptops.
Yes, which is ironic because python is the language with a lot of magic syntax compared to Ruby. Ruby gives you blocks which you can do a lot of powerful things with, while python creates a magic syntax for many of those use cases (with, decorators, list comprehensions, etc).
If I remembered correctly Rails originated the concept of an opinionated framework, and everybody else copied it to some extent. Yet it's the only platform that the author disses. Maybe this has something to do with the suspicious stuff that happened in the Rails community a while back.
Quibble the first: a language is not a framework. Python and Ruby may be "opinionated" in some sense, but they are not opinionated frameworks. The article's complaints about Ruby in particular...
> It dives deeply into the concept of convention-over-configuration, and in doing so, creates a lot of behind the scenes magic that requires a lot of pre-knowledge before using or understanding it well; the true knowledge of its syntax and its behaviors feels more tribalistic to a set of esoteric elders who have taken the time to read the documentation, but is not necessarily friendly to casual beginners.
...are very clearly complaints about Rails. There's a waggish nod to that ("one could say it has gone off the rails"), but convention over configuration and behind-the-scenes magic are attributes of Rails, the framework, not Ruby, the language.
I've noticed this confusion before, to be fair, but it's an important distinction. As someone who genuinely likes Rails but loves Ruby as a scripting language, there are times I think it may have been the worst thing to happen to Ruby. (Well, the second worst, behind Ruby version managers, but I digress.)
Quibble the second: "Linux distros are not opinionated, quite the opposite, with each distro expressing itself slightly differently." I believe you could call those different expressions opinions. :) This little footnote on OSes conflates "opinionated" with "locked in," and while we all may have different definitions of "lock in," those things are not equivalent.