I think python is the only language where the inevitable flamewar isn't about the language itself (it is instead about static vs dynamic typing). Java might be in this list too (usually the war is about OOP in general, but there's plenty of criticism levied at Java itself).

Discussions about C devolve into a religious war about simplicity and portability vs safety and an inadequate standard library.

Discussions about C++ devolve into a religious war about memory safety, bloat, developer competency, UB, and more.

Discussions about Haskell devolve into a religious war about powerful type systems and language constructs vs performance concerns, development complexity, and "endofunctors, lol."

Discussions about JS devolve into a religious war about npm, web dev in general, "== vs === lol" and more.

Discussions about Rust... oh boy.

In my experience, most discussions of specific components of languages inevitably spill into these broad and neverending religious wars.

Oh! I want to play too!

Discussions about Go devolve into a religious war about simplicity and portability vs "the creators of the language said its only for dum dums and it shows", "it took them 10+ years to get generics", and more.

Discussion about Zig devolve into a religious war about living in a universe where C exists and not wanting to write it versus "there's too many C-likes", "why isn't this Rust", and more.

Discussions about Erlang devolve into a religious war about standing up fault tolerant and scalable distributed systems, Joe was the nicest guy ever vs "you can do that in X all you have to do is Y".

Discussions about Elixir devolve into a religious war about Erlang and Ruby's love child, José Valim is the nicest guy ever versus "you can do that in X all you have to do is Y", "but what about types" and more.

Discussions about Clojure devolve into a religious war about people writing impressive programs in their spare time, "I actually get paid to write Clojure" versus "does anyone actually get paid to write Clojure".

Discussions about Elm devolve into a religious war about type safety and staying sane versus Richard Feldman lost his temper once, the 0.19 release and "everyone has Stockholm syndrome over there".

Discussions about V devolve into a religious war about "this is not a scam" versus "this is a scam".

Discussions about Nim generally don't, or the language creator is going off on D-forums / Twitter / X again.

Discussions about PHP inevitably end up in a "The language is better now" vs "You can still write this crap" loop. ;)

Yeah, absolutely. Ruby just has its own unique flavour of holy wars because it somehow manages to make people either to be totally enamoured with it or utterly sickened by it, with almost no middle ground ― which is quite an achievement TBF. So when the latter group reads something like "This is absolutely delightful! As a non-ruby developer I see things like this and get jealous of ruby developers", they can't help buy conclude that the other side is straight up demented and should probably be disallowed to handle sharp objects like scissors and monkey-patching, and the holy war may commence.

I think any language with big fans will inspire equally motivated critics. Especially if the critics believe the accolades are undeserved.

You can see that in Go. It was a hugely hyped language, backed by Google, but without a lot of wishlist items that C++/Java/Python/Ruby/etc developers would have liked.

You can see that with Rust. There is the “rewrite everything in rust” crowd, which inspires anti-rust people to speak up.

I find it crazy how much criticism Rust, Go, Ruby, etc receive when Python has such glaring flaws. From the 2-to-3 migration, to package management. The consensus seems to be that’s just the cost of doing business.

By the way, I’m a Python developer. I don’t hate Ruby. But it seems like most Ruby fans love the elegance and consistency of its design, whereas that never resonated with me. E.g calling obj.length rather then len(obj) is surely more elegant. I never really cared though?

I guess I just find it interesting how some languages cons are excused while others aren’t. And how people can be drawn to some languages while others hate them.

There is a significant anti-Ruby sentiment in the tech industry right now, especially in certain fields like InfoSec, that is being pushed by a very vocal subset of the community. Whenever they see Ruby come up, they will try pushing the meme that Ruby is dead/dying/irrelevant and cite TIOBE; despite Ruby developers continuing to release new libraries, frameworks, and tooling. Or they will claim no popular websites use Ruby; apparently GitHub, LinkedIn, and AirBnB are not popular enough? Or claim MetaSploit is the only security tool written in Ruby; off the top of my head I can think of BeFF, CeWL, Evil-WinRM, and Ronin. Or claim no company uses or supports Ruby; GitHub, Shopify, Stripe all use and support Ruby. Or they will derail any positive discussion about Ruby into some intractable debate about Static vs Dynamic Typing, GC, interpretive languages, etc; even though many of the arguments against Ruby can equally be applied to Python, and yet there's no similar criticism of Python. It's really annoying and inconsistent.

Um, they do. Have you been in any of the Rust threads?

Ruby is a rather dynamic language, which makes it both fun for some people, and untrustworthy for some people, and both for some people.

Flag bad comments, don't write meta comments about how the comments are bad, that only makes threads worse.

rust does this as well and it's because the community around both are snobs just for different reasons.