In the original article, author never actually went into why they disliked their experience with Ruby. They listed some historical shortcomings which we can only presume they were experiencing on the code base they found themself working on. I think the best point out of that first article was don't pick Ruby as a development language in 2025, there are better options for any advantage you might think it will give you.
I think that should've been the main point to attack.
In the present article, the author went for pathos instead and in some ironic sense confirmed the previous article's notion that Ruby is powered by sentimentality.
Many people that adore Elixir also think Ruby is a no go, despite the latter being a strong influence. Arguments against Elixir tend to revolve around its lack of traction, not its lack of seriousness.
> Many people that adore Elixir also think Ruby is a no go, despite the latter being a strong influence. Arguments against Elixir tend to revolve around its lack of traction, not its lack of seriousness.
Elixir is funny. I've done Elixir for years now, and did some Ruby at the beginning of my career. A ton of people come to Elixir for the familiarity of the Ruby-like syntax but with a functional programming basis. They like Ruby but get tired of OOP and mutable state and want to try something else. They tend to stay for the runtime/VM, called the BEAM.
Don't get me wrong, the Elixir language is nice, but the BEAM and its operational characteristics feel night-and-day compared to Ruby and most other languages that were designed for a world of single-threaded programming.
When you're using the BEAM (any language - there are a few now) there's this amazing sense that you're using something that was _designed to be operated_. You can instrument anything. You can trace anything. You can see the live state of anything. You can restart anything. It's a holistic _system_ for building systems, not just a language.
> When you're using the BEAM (any language - there are a few now) there's this amazing sense that you're using something that was _designed to be operated_. You can instrument anything. You can trace anything. You can see the live state of anything. You can restart anything. It's a holistic _system_ for building systems, not just a language.
Well said. Question for elixir fans or the haters, what's the perception re: current blockers for widespread adoption? Years ago, it was nothing more or less than third-party libs and frameworks. That must be better by now, or there's a short-list of what's missing?
Somewhat of a tangent, but TFA doesn't mention python and I would think for rubyists this is (still) the elephant in the room. It kind of won to the extent they target the same niches and same audiences, for better or worse. I know it's kinda naive, but I was really hoping elixir would get all of the ruby crowd excited, and they'd move the best parts that they can't live without into elixir. Why didn't they / don't they? Is it all about OOP? Or if rails is the killer app, would a rails "skin" for phoenix not go a long way towards scratching the itch?
> what's the perception re: current blockers for widespread adoption? Years ago, it was nothing more or less than third-party libs and frameworks. That must be better by now, or there's a short-list of what's missing?
It's complicated.
The library/framework situation is much better than it used to be. There isn't much that's glaringly missing anymore. Some things have lighter maintenance than one might like, but most stuff is there.
I think Elixir and the BEAM have a weird problem in that it's somewhat hard to understand their benefits until you use them. This is not the case with a lot of other stuff. If you were coming from Java in the 90s and you saw Ruby, you didn't have to use Ruby to realize just how much less code it took to do similar things. You could just see code examples.
If you used Perl back in the day, you didn't have to actually use Python to see how much easier it was to read Python as a novice compared to Perl's eccentricities.
The BEAM is tough to sell because its benefits are not something you can easily see on a screen at a meetup, for example. "What if you had a VM that was designed for the ground up for concurrency" doesn't sell. People respond with "well my language already has threads and promises". "What if your language gave you a builtin toolkit to partition and restart the various different subsystems in a rigorous, well-defined way?" People say, "I already have systemd and it restarts my services."
Having done it for some years now, the BEAM kinda has "the quality without a name"[0]. It feels "whole" in a way that other environments don't, and that's difficult to show. This is not something that shows up trivially on a slide deck or a landing page, and most people don't want to take a gamble on a smaller language community that's seen as different and weird compared to the more mainstream language they already know, especially when the most positive things they hear are "it's a functional language that does concurrency better". For most people, this just isn't a compelling enough pitch to get them to leave Python or Javascript or Java (or Ruby).
By the way, I'm not blaming folks, this is both a rational and normal way of evaluating risk when faced with an unintelligible upside and an immediately apparent downside (small community, uncertain career prospects, questionable library coverage, etc.). I think as a community, we (Elixir) have done a poor job in making Elixir seem less risky.
> Somewhat of a tangent, but TFA doesn't mention python and I would think for rubyists this is (still) the elephant in the room. It kind of won to the extent they target the same niches and same audiences, for better or worse.
IMHO Python won the war. Ruby won server-side webapps battle with Rails, which is still going strong, but Python won literally everything else by a landslide. And Python still even has Django. Python is _everywhere_. There's no stats on this that I know of, but I bet 90%+ of Ruby usage is Rails. This is not the case with Python.
To be clear, this is all in the context of adoption. Ruby may never have Python's adoption, but Ruby has been hugely influential. Tons of other technology can trace its lineage to Ruby, whether it's Elixir as a language, or Rust's tooling (Cargo), etc.
> I know it's kinda naive, but I was really hoping elixir would get all of the ruby crowd excited, and they'd move the best parts that they can't live without into elixir. Why didn't they / don't they?
Rails still has a large amount of inertia, both technically and culturally. It's still very good at its niche. Getting Rails folks to move away from Rails would take something as better as Rails was than the Java stuff that came before it. Plus, some people just love Ruby! Elixir isn't Ruby. Elixir is more explicit, doesn't have mutability, doesn't have objects, etc. The similarity really ends at syntax, and I think a lot of Ruby folks are happy with what Ruby is, which is totally fine.
I'm surprised that Crystal[1][2], a heavily inspired by Ruby compiled language, was not mentioned in all of this. Though it has more of an issue than Elixir, where various people can feel it has not gained enough traction[3][4] (according to various rankings). Elixir at least ranks in the top 50, per TIOBE.
YMMV, but both articles are two nothingburgers. First one doesn't say a thing about what's possibly wrong Ruby language but rambles something about StackOverflow popularity and Twitter issues, second one doesn't say a thing about what's wrong with the first article and just tells a tale about Ol' Good Times and aesthetic differences.
The fact that it's not some LLM-produced slop for engagement, but something that was written by real humans and is somehow paid attention by real humans is sort of depressing.
I think that should've been the main point to attack.
In the present article, the author went for pathos instead and in some ironic sense confirmed the previous article's notion that Ruby is powered by sentimentality.
Many people that adore Elixir also think Ruby is a no go, despite the latter being a strong influence. Arguments against Elixir tend to revolve around its lack of traction, not its lack of seriousness.