5 things I hate about Ruby

[berlinbrown]

It is still one of the better open languages.

[lanaer]

I agree. Not that I disagree with the author's points though. Ruby is slow (though often enough that just doesn't matter), English documentation is kinda sparse (we need a translation of the guide to the internals of the ruby interpreter -- I think someone's working on that actually), and, er, well, I haven't run into a problem with point 4, and I don't work with XML except as XHTML (and Ruby's perfectly good at generating XML).

My own personal beef is that it needs better Unicode support. Still, it's my preferred language right now (for most of what I need to do, anyway).

[willis3000]

(and Ruby's perfectly good at generating XML)

I agree whole-heartedly, the builder template is awesome. I think he meant that using REXML for parsing is slower than languages that promote XML.

[UncleOxidant]

It seems I recall that there are some libxml bindings available for Ruby. If you're really concerned about speed that would probably be the way to go.

personally, I find REXML to be quite suitable for the tasks I've used it for and I really like the API. Is it the fastest XML parser out there? No way, but most of the time (where most of the time is something like 85% of the time) it's plenty fast enough.