On RubyGems

Ruby is an OK language, but it lacks the all-important feature that makes Perl Perl: CPAN. With CPAN, you can download and (usually) install any number of user-contributed modules onto your system in minutes.

It's nice. Whenever I have another language that relies on other modules, I miss the relative ease of use of just typing "perl -MCPAN -e shell" and then "install Whatever::I::Want" at the cpan> prompt.

Ruby has RubyGems, which I think is written in Ruby. Either way, the idea is like this: if you want to install something called Ruby-Module, you merely download RubyGems instead, install it, run "gem install ruby-module", update your locally-saved list of available gem modules, and hope you don't get a TypeError or an aborted install because of an unexpected end of line.

To put it briefly, RubyGems is awful. On paper, it's probably great to be able to type "gem install blah", but in reality the reliability of RubyGems has a long, long way to go. You can tell the developers were looking at apt-get as inspiration, and in truth there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that RubyGems is exactly what it would be like if you wanted apt-get, used yum source code as a starting point, designed it to work like rpm, and wound up with a utility slightly less enjoyable than hammering rusty nails through your penis.

I'm not 100% on this, but I'm pretty sure hammering nails through my penis might install software on my laptop faster, too.

RubyGems is awful. There's just no two ways around it. Everything I do to try to like Ruby as a language (and Ruby on Rails as a platform) is utterly thwarted by a completely broken implementation and lack of good resources.

I'm going to update my RubyGems installation to 0.9.2, and then I'm going to go find my hammer and some nails.