Oh, and if REXML sucks so bad, why does the Ruby team make sure that it ships with every Ruby distribution? What does it say about the language that they allow something so woefully broken to be a backbone of their language?

Got some documentation on Hpricot and namespaces? I haven’t found any support.

Instead, use Hpricot.XML, which is awesome, seriously fast, ridiculously easy to use and awesome.

http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/

You can select stuff with CSS or XPATH selectors, change it, print it out. It doesn’t get any easier.

Here’s the summary of my experience: I haven’t used the core library’s built-in RSS feed, so I don’t know how that works out. REXML is to be avoided. Hpricot is pretty nice, as long as you don’t need to deal with namespaces.

Glad I saw this!

You’re welcome to tackle Ruby and it’s problems — for my part, I was mainly trying to vent (see above for more on that). I’d encourage you to post your stuff on Ruby and Ruby’s core libraries: I’d be curious to see what you’ve bumped into.

Now that I’m a little calmer, let me add some more. I may rework this and some other thoughts into a more coherent post in the near future — I haven’t decided.

Here’s the thing: open source libraries are one thing. I’m used to those being of dubious quality, and I’m worth putting some effort in to fix them. Even more, I’ve cut Ruby on Rails a lot of slack, because the bugs and the awkwardness are the price that you pay to hang out with the beer-swilling hipsters that make out that community and roll with the rapid rate of development. And, really, it is the best web framework I’ve dealt with, mainly because it provides the most comprehensive and extensible set of functionality of any framework, and it’s got a solid community to back it up.

However, it’s doing this all by constantly just barely working. That’s the price you pay: the development constantly pushes to the very edge of tolerance, and APIs you took for granted in the last release may fade away, and there’s this constant concern about stability.

But, the argument ran, static typing really doesn’t get you anything. It’s the unit tests that do it. The testing will exercise the API and give you — for all practical purposes, anyway — the protection that static typing will. So all this clinging to static typing is just old fogies who can’t pry their insecurities away from their enterprisey languages long enough to see how people really get productive.

And that argument isn’t one I really buy. But I hear it a lot. And I hear people griping about how bad static typing is, for reasons that have zero applicability to any language whose type system postdates the Reagan administration. And I try to mention things to engage in dialog, and it’s really gotten nowhere. But, y’know, hey, if the unit tests really do provide the same protection, then it’s no big deal.

But then this went down. If Ruby cannot even keep their standard library in check — if they, as the leaders of the language, can’t manage to keep themselves together, and keep something as common as reading and writing XML working — if they fall apart in ways that straightforward static type checking would solve, and if it burns a full day of my precious and limited time trying to figure it out, then I feel like all that tolerance and engaging in dialog just bit me in my ass.

This frustrates me because I have run into many things in Ruby and Ruby’s core libraries that make me wary of considering it a “mature” language or one I’d really be interested in designing production systems in, and you were well on your way to aptly pointing that out, until you chose to use your rhetorical sword to slay a dragon far out of range.