Because, though this is a relatively sober and even-handed example of the genre, it still inevitably contains howlers like this:
Search for "rails". Most of these programmers will depend on one library, Rails, but then get the rest of their code by cutting-and-pasting from blogs.
Which is hardly surprising. This is the canonical problem with articles like this one: The guy doesn't waste time tinkering with Ruby, because he's busy being productive with Perl, so why should he be expected to know anything about how the Ruby community works?
(This is why I try not to write about Python except to assert that it must be one of the best languages in the world: I'm literally unsure how to write hello, world in Python, but smart people use it all over the place, so deference and politeness forces me to assume that it's utterly perfect until proven otherwise.)
Anyway, I'll help out by saying that I think jrockaway's point still stands, albeit on fewer legs than before: Perl is a considerably older language, its community is more experienced, it's (among other things) a traditional tool of system administrators -- who are, in my experience, relentlessly pragmatic people who crave stability, reliability, and clear docs -- and so it has had a lot more time and incentive to organize and standardize its packaging and documentation systems. Ruby does have docs difficulties, as do many open-source projects which have recently experienced explosive growth.
No. He has. So have I. He's commenting on the reality of a culture dominated by fanboyism and a framework advertised on the basis of being "full stack" which to naive eyes can seem to be "everything you need".
rubygems -enables- granular reuse of libraries, and many ruby people take great advantage of it.
But as a whole the perl community has got a hell of a lot more practice than the rails community at it - and of course rails has inherited the same fanboyish muppets that used to give perl a bad name (line noise? no, that's a phase you go through and grow out of if you're any good, takes about 3 months or however long it takes you to need to maintain your own line noise :), went on to give PHP a bad name, and in a few years will probably have given rails a bad name (possibly they are doing already? I dunno, being a perl head I tend to ignore that sort of groupthink idiocy, my language was unfashionable when I first learned it :)
I know numerous people who have started using Rails only recently and use plenty of gems and plugins (and even write/distribute their own in some cases).
There are muppets everywhere, but I don't think they dominate the Rails community.
Rails still looks hopelessly monolithic to a perl dev though - we can't quite see why you'd want to ship a DB library in core when, hey, web apps don't -all- talk to SQL databases.
As for the quality of said DB library, well, many smart ruby developers have torn it to pieces quite adequately so I'll just say "google is your friend" and not bother with a half-informed opinion of my own.
Take any worthwhile topic, and you'll find smart people on both sides of the fence. Many smart people bitch about ActiveRecord, but many more use it and find it highly productive. "Torn to pieces" my ass.
If you can't see why a web app framework might want to ship a DB library, you're blind.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html
Because, though this is a relatively sober and even-handed example of the genre, it still inevitably contains howlers like this:
Search for "rails". Most of these programmers will depend on one library, Rails, but then get the rest of their code by cutting-and-pasting from blogs.
Someone has never heard of gems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RubyGems
Which is hardly surprising. This is the canonical problem with articles like this one: The guy doesn't waste time tinkering with Ruby, because he's busy being productive with Perl, so why should he be expected to know anything about how the Ruby community works?
(This is why I try not to write about Python except to assert that it must be one of the best languages in the world: I'm literally unsure how to write hello, world in Python, but smart people use it all over the place, so deference and politeness forces me to assume that it's utterly perfect until proven otherwise.)
Anyway, I'll help out by saying that I think jrockaway's point still stands, albeit on fewer legs than before: Perl is a considerably older language, its community is more experienced, it's (among other things) a traditional tool of system administrators -- who are, in my experience, relentlessly pragmatic people who crave stability, reliability, and clear docs -- and so it has had a lot more time and incentive to organize and standardize its packaging and documentation systems. Ruby does have docs difficulties, as do many open-source projects which have recently experienced explosive growth.