Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the main weaknesses of Ruby as a programming language?

15th October 2010

My answer to What are the main weaknesses of Ruby as a programming language? on Quora

Ruby still has a cultural tendency towards monkey-patching, aka action-at-a-distance. There are plenty of gems which modify existing classes—sometimes in ways that can break working code.

Posted 15th October 2010 at 9:17 am · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

My review of Claude's new Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name - 9th September 2025
Recreating the Apollo AI adoption rate chart with GPT-5, Python and Pyodide - 9th September 2025
GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search - 6th September 2025

This is What are the main weaknesses of Ruby as a programming language? by Simon Willison, posted on 15th October 2010.

programming 156 programming-languages 36 ruby 72 software-engineering 58 quora 1005

Next: Is there any consensus yet on link rel=shorturl vs rev=canonical?

Previous: What are the best websites for finding out about events in San Francisco in advance, i.e., before they take place?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe