# Ruby flaws , follow up to Ruby goodies **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [June 24, 2006, 8:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-flaws-follow-up-to-ruby-goodies/64369 "2006-06-24T20:41:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roggan)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2006, 8:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-flaws-follow-up-to-ruby-goodies/64369/1 "2006-06-24T20:41:13Z")
Ok Ive got a fair picture of whats good about Ruby. Now what would you consider to be the biggest flaws or limitations in ruby? I personally thought that going from a type safe language to a dynamic one would be more of a fuzz, but I have hardly noticed any problems. the thing I have most problems with in that respect is that I have to reffer to the documentation for every single method to see what they return. eg, “Class.instance\_methods” returns an array of strings, I would have bet money on that it would return an array of “Methods” so I guess using a 3rd party lib with poor documentation must be a real pain in ruby, while its not that/as bad in eg c# where you can atleast guess what to do based on return / in parameter types the next thing that I have a hard time with is the IDE’s since Im used to having [VS.NET](http://VS.NET) wiping my butt all the time, its a pain using some notepad++ sort of IDE, however Ive found activestate Komodo which atleast is decent except for some random hangups… (ok that wasnt a problem with the language, its more of a lacking tool support) and the one thing that scares me the most, name collisions. since its possible to extend classes to left and right and doing all sorts of cool stuff, there must be a huge risk that frameworks extend eg “Class” with methods that collide or such things? it feels a little bit like installing all your applications directly on C: root. (I know you can get some namespace’ish thing with modules) Anything else that I can expect to get disappointed at with Ruby? //Roger ---
**Author:** ![roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roggan)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2006, 9:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-flaws-follow-up-to-ruby-goodies/64369/2 "2006-06-24T21:07:39Z")
I’ve found that the only thing I’ve worried about is threads as they aren’t true. However, this hasn’t been a problem with me as I haven’t done any real multi-threading work. It’s in the back of my mind though. I find it to be a real pain in the ass to code in anything but Ruby now. Java and C feel grotesque, and these were the languages I had the most experience in before Ruby. Mind you, I’m a young programmer and am truly cutting my teeth with Ruby. Best of luck, James ---
**Author:** ![roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roggan)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2006, 9:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-flaws-follow-up-to-ruby-goodies/64369/3 "2006-06-24T21:57:25Z")
Hi Roger, On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 03:41:32AM +0900, Roger J. wrote: > Ok Ive got a fair picture of whats good about Ruby. > Now what would you consider to be the biggest flaws or limitations in > ruby? > […] ``` Although they are no big deal for me, three of the most common Ruby ``` problems are Unicode, threads and performance. The third is not a real problem for most people, and you can write Ruby extensions in C very easily for extreme cases. ``` I, personally, can't stand most of the build and install tools for ``` Ruby, they seem to be very hostile against repackagers (I’m a Debian Developer, part of the Ruby modules packagers team). ``` Perhaps others can add more things to this list... Regards, ``` ---
**Author:** ![roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roggan)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2006, 1:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-flaws-follow-up-to-ruby-goodies/64369/4 "2006-06-25T01:28:38Z")
Roger J. wrote: > Ok Ive got a fair picture of whats good about Ruby. > Now what would you consider to be the biggest flaws or limitations in > ruby? Here are some of the things that matz (the creator of Ruby) dislikes about it: [http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/rc2003/mgp00003.html](http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/rc2003/mgp00003.html) ---
**Author:** ![roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roggan)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2006, 6:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-flaws-follow-up-to-ruby-goodies/64369/5 "2006-06-25T06:45:39Z")
On 6/24/06, snacktime [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Lack of available modules for certain things, such as kerberos… > That’s killed a few ruby projects for me. Someone here at RailsConf was saying that he had built a C extension to wrap a Kerberos library. Can’t remember who right now, unfortunately. ---
**Author:** ![roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roggan)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2006, 2:30am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-flaws-follow-up-to-ruby-goodies/64369/6 "2006-06-25T02:30:09Z")
Lack of available modules for certain things, such as kerberos… That’s killed a few ruby projects for me. ---
**Author:** ![roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roggan)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2006, 6:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-flaws-follow-up-to-ruby-goodies/64369/7 "2006-06-25T18:07:37Z")
On 6/24/06, snacktime [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Lack of available modules for certain things, such as kerberos… > That’s killed a few ruby projects for me. Exactly how would you want that to work? (I’ve built a KDC with associated Ruby tools for a commercial product and we might possibly open some of it.) Are you expecting that your Ruby applications would be a Kerb client to do user auth against some remote KDC? ---
**Author:** ![roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@roggan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roggan)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2006, 3:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-flaws-follow-up-to-ruby-goodies/64369/8 "2006-06-26T03:23:32Z")
> Exactly how would you want that to work? (I’ve built a KDC with associated > Ruby tools for a commercial product and we might possibly open some of it.) > Are you expecting that your Ruby applications would be a Kerb client to do > user auth against some remote KDC? We need pretty much full functionality. We run a couple of KDC’s and have our own single sign on system written in perl (modeled after the Yale CAS system). In fact it’s most of the administrative functions that would come in handy, since authentication can go through the SSO system. Chris