Fighting words on Ruby
Is anyone but me dismayed by the current state of Ruby? It's a great language, and it has a lot of promise--but there are also major issues that make Ruby and related efforts seem more like a set of academic projects than serious production-quality programming tools. The main thing that prevents me from using Ruby is that the 1.8 interpreter is too weak, and the other alternatives are too immature. I can use Ruby for scripting in the same way that I'd use Perl or PHP, but I wouldn't want to write a major application using a technology that doesn't support native threads, Unicode, or some kind of GUI. Yes, I know that you can roll some primitive Unicode support into Ruby, and I know that there are several GUI toolkits out there, but overall, Ruby's support for anything beyond basic scripting is spotty. So what are the alternatives? I guess the front-runner is JRuby, but JRuby is really just a scripting language that works with Java, not something that you'd