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

Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things - 16th August 2026
Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face - 7th August 2026
One-shotting a Raccoon Heist game using Claude Fable 5 - 5th August 2026

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

programming 158 programming-languages 42 ruby 74 software-engineering 63 quora 1,005

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