I think this bitter old grouch, venting about ruby, gets alot right. Be sure to read past the headings of his five complaints. He actually has some legitimate gripes.
Do I have gripes about Ruby? At this point I don't know enough about Ruby to be sure that any gripes I have are legit. I found the above link while trying to figure out why REXML was so slow. I thought I was doing something wrong. Turns out you if you are trying to read in a large XML file with REXML, you are just doomed. JAXP is several orders of magnitude faster, although I couldn't find any benchmarks to back this claim. REXML works fundamentally differently from JAXP. REXML uses regexes to parse while I think JAXP parses at a lower level. That being said, REXML is sooo much easier to use than JAXP, so if your file size is small, it isn't so bad. I wonder if using jRuby to access JAXP would be an interim solution to this for ruby programmers.
Another gripe I have is with Rails fixtures. I find that making multiple tests dependent on a set of fixtures will make your tests brittle. If someone writes a new test and adds to the fixtures to support it, often you find tests will break because of it. If you are vigilant about it you can probably always write a test that won't break when someone adds
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