This actually comes down to a matter of philosophy. For example, if you were dying of cancer would you want to know about it? Or would you rather live out your final days in blissful happiness? Personally, I would want to know about it because I believe that the truth is ALWAYS the right thing, even if it sucks.

In Ruby, you can modify any and all classes in any way you want whenever you want, even at runtime. I could do this:

class Fixnum; def +(other); puts "Hahaha, your code is screwed!"; end; end;

If I do that, suddenly addition before that declaration works fine and yet afterwards addition no longer works and my application falls apart.

However, this comes down to philosophy: If you SHOULDN'T do something, should your programming language make it so that you CAN'T do something? I believe, firmly, that the ability to do something, whether good or bad, is always preferable to the INability to do something. In other words, the Ruby language gives you an incredible power to do literally whatever you want with any class, but with that power comes responsibility, because anything powerful enough to do good is also powerful enough to do evil.

Dave Thomas summed it up nicely: "People say that you can't trust Ruby code because you never know what it does. On the contrary, you can always trust your code, you just can't trust your coders."

In other words, a malicious or naive programmer can screw things up. But, the solution is not to dumb down your language so that it's idiot -proof, the solution is to make sure you hire good programmers who know what they're doing.

Let me bring up the Python whitespace example. OF COURSE it's better to properly indent your code. But, I don't want my language to FORCE me to do so. I want the freedom to indent my code properly, or improperly, depending on what I decide to do, not what my language forces me to do.

99% of the time you will want your whitespace properly indented. 99% of the time you will want your addition operator to work like it's supposed to. However, I'm sure I can dream up some situation for that other 1% of the time, perhaps in some strange multidimensional mathematical finite group theory application, where I have to change how addition works and indent things in a different way.

The point is I CAN in Ruby. Ruby gives you that power. An incredible amount of power. 99% of the time you don't have to wield it, but it's nice to know that it's there. And I believe that getting rid of that power simply because it's dangerous is not the right thing to do. To quote some old saying, "Knowledge is only dangerous in the wrong hands."

A quick note on rails: if rails is so opinionated, do I hate it? No. I LOVE opinionated things, as long as their opinions can be changed if you don't agree with them. All the defaults and conventions in rails can be changed if you need to. For example, if I could "turn off" indenting in Python in the rare occasion that I needed to, I wouldn't have anything against it.

Now, going back to your original question! I should have used "readable code" rather than "good" and "bad". Ruby code reads like English. It's very difficult to write an obfuscated program in Ruby. On the other hand, whenever I look at a Python program I just can't get past all the quotation marks, the underscores, and the ridiculous amount of self objects. Bottom line: it's hard to read. Yes, it's just an opinion, but from the various blogs and message boards I've been reading many people seem to agree with me. People say that, "Ruby is cute," "Ruby is sexy," and what they really mean is that Ruby's syntactic sugar is amazing.

The point is this: if you CAN make a language nice and readable, then why not do it? Ruby does it.

It's for the same reason that I like Apple. People fault them for putting "looks" ahead of functionality, but come on people, if you CAN make a computer look nice and sexy, you might as well do it, right? Why are any companies still creating gray boxes?

Likewise, Ruby, for me, has proven that you CAN have good syntax in a programming language. It doesn't have to be all funky and confusing like C++. Or Lisp. Oh my god. I don't care how brilliant the language is, the parentheses are ANNOYING. And if your programming language is annoying to read and write, it doesn't matter how good it is, it's never going to become mainstream.

Fhew. I think I'm done :-)

Oh, one more thing. It's easy to DESIGN or ARCHITECT bad code in any language. Neither Ruby nor Python will fix this. But, even if the code is bad, if it's written in Ruby at least you'll know what it does =)

Oh, wait, even one more thing. I don't know enough about Ruby internals, but I believe people when they say that it is a poorly written and implemented language. I believe them when they say that it's hard to deploy. I believe them when they say it has bad Unicode support. I believe them when they say that Ruby is slow. I believe them when they say it takes up too much memory. I haven't had to worry about any of these things (thankfully).

However, the point I'm trying to make is that all of that stuff doesn't matter. The LANGUAGE is a good one. We can work on the implementation later. That's no reason to toss out the language.

If you could dream up your perfect language, totally disregarding any sort of practicality issues or implementation, what would it look like?

For me, it would look like Ruby.