Last week I asked in this blog, What are your Java pain points, really? The discussion last week was fruitful, and this week I'd like to ask a similar question for Ruby. My question about Ruby pain points stems from my desire to make sure I understand the actual tradeoffs represented by Ruby, given that there seems to be some hype going around, especially surrounding Rails. One thing I admire about both Rails and Ruby is that they are well marketed. The ruby-lang.org site is very well done, and does a great job of getting curious programmers to try Ruby. And Rails has been expertly marketed with one simple message: it helps you write web apps fast by favoring convention over configuration. But my observation is that Rails in particular has been promoted by trumpeting its good points and downplaying its bad.

I have used Ruby in small scripts, and I like it. But I hope to hear this week from people who have built some pretty serious things with it. It is somehow hard to separate Rails from Ruby, but I'm not interested in hearing about Rails pain points. I'm really interested in understanding what pain points exist today in the general Ruby programming experience. What are your Ruby pain points, really? Please post your list of Ruby pain points in the discussion forum for this blog post.

  case object.class
    when Hash
    end

    when String
    end
  end

  case object
    when /foo.*bar/
      # This is hit if we had a string such as "foobar", "foo bar", etc.
    end

    when 1..10
      # This is hit if we had a number (integer or float) >= 1 and <= 10
    end
  end