The presence indicator, it does with Google Talk, as you pointed out -- which means it does so with the Jabber protocol. Indeed, this only really works if someone has a Jabber account which matches their email address -- which you get for free with GMail.
So that actually kind of proves my point.
The email itself, if by "close to instant" you mean "maybe minutes before you get it", sorry, that's not instant. That's why there's a separate IM in GMail (Google Talk) which is actually instant, and again, uses Jabber.
You can't really do these kinds of tricks with SMTP alone. It's possible you could get stuff to happen instantly, but SMTP is both overkill and actually unsuited to that use. You certainly aren't going to get presence.
Actually, IM is legitimately different than email, which has no presence notification, and certainly isn't instant in pretty much any implementation I've seen. We also have Jabber now, so IM doesn't have to be a walled garden.
I do agree about SMS, but once upon a time, it actually made sense to have something entirely different for the cellular networks. My original problem with SMS was that it was a way to nickel and dime you to death -- but now I've got an unlimited SMS plan, so it doesn't matter. It's still significantly easier for a cell network to handle a quick SMS message than an always-on Internet connection, so it's still cheaper for me to send text messages than spring for internet access on my phone.
And while I've never seen anyone tie email to Jabber, it's certainly possible, though I can't imagine it'd be fun to use.
I actually agree with the other poster's comment about walled gardens, and I do agree that making a new walled garden that's deliberately not interoperable is backwards and evil. However, just because something is a way to exchange messages which happen to be composed of text doesn't mean it's the same medium or deserves the same protocol.
Case in point: Wave was an attempt to unify forums, email, instant messaging, basically all online communication, and I really wanted to like it. It failed miserably.
If we both use a POTS number, that kind of defeats the point of VOIP in the first place -- Skype computer-to-computer calls, for instance, are free aside from the bandwidth used.
If we don't, there's no way to connect us. By contrast, if Skype used some sort of standard, I could actually switch to a new service and bring all my Skype contacts. In other words, people are stuck with Skype the same way they're stuck with Facebook, with the various non-Jabber Instant Messaging services, and so on -- but not the same way they're stuck with, for instance, email.
All Skype does is connect users and punch holes in NATs. Take something at least standard (like SIP), if not peer-to-peer, and you don't have massive failures just because one VOIP provider goes down.
in C/C++ the type of a reference/pointer to something is syntactically different than the type of a value to the same thing
Not really. In particular, C++'s "reference" types are syntactically identical other than their declaration. The only difference is at object creation, and that has far less to do with whether it's a reference or not than it does with whether it's on the heap or not.
That is, the difference here:
C c(...);
That's on the stack, which means it'll be cleaned up when it falls out of scope, which means I don't have to delete it, but I better not leave any references to it around. This one:
C *c = new C(...);
That's on the heap, which means I better be sure it gets deleted somewhere. But that's about it. Nothing's stopping me from doing things like, for instance:
C &c = new C(...);
Now the only meaningful difference is that I have to remember to delete it.
if have you ever discussed programming with someone who started coding in Java, then you know what I mean:)
I don't know, the people I've talked to who started in Java and then learned C seem to be doing alright -- probably largely because when we teach them Java, we force them to come face-to-face with the concept of references and == vs equals.
I myself started in QBASIC. The most confusion I see is when people who've started in something like C++ start using something like Ruby, and they want to know about "pass-by-reference" vs "pass-by-value", so I have to actually make them unlearn everything they know about manual memory management and just start thinking in terms of objects.
Yeah, I'm a bit sick of brand-recycling in general. Even if they were good, there's a good chance fans of the original would be disappointed -- nostalgia is a capricious thing.
I'm in a BS school now which has multiple categories they demand (for well-roundedness), does allow Spanish, and my experience so far is a decent administration who more or less knows what they're doing.
They also offer software engineering, which is much more tightly focused on computer science, engineering, and really nothing else. This is because the software engineering degree is from the College of Engineering, while the computer science degree is from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
In any case, I'd have to say that's a problem with the schools you were in. I'd recommend ignoring BA vs BS and just find a school you like. Then, if they offer both, maybe go for the BS.
In that situation there are no moral certainties you can use to decide what to do. The major religions can't help you. The only thing you can do is judge each cause by your feelings and the weight you assign it.
Bullshit.
Certainly, the major religions may not be able to help you, but that's hardly news, and you're presenting subjectivism as the only alternative? Simple utilitarianism could resolve this dilemma.
I don't necessarily disagree that in this situation, a subjectivist approach might be a good idea, but it's far from the only thing you can do, and there's no reason you can't resolve it with an absolute, provided you've accepted an absolute ethical system.
In Java, you have to look no farther than the == operator. It compares the primitive type, and thus, if you apply to objects, it will only compare the references, not the objects. Having an understanding of this sort of thing is basically required, because to do any sort of meaningful comparison, you have to do:
a == b
if it's something primitive, like ints, but if it's an object, you have to do:
a.equals(b)
Worse still, you can't just make everything an object and forget about it -- then what happens when you've got null? Now you need:
(a == null && b == null) || a.equals(b)
This is something which makes no sense unless you understand the dichotomy between an object reference (which can, in fact, be null) and an object itself (which cannot). It's also critical for understanding why if the same object is accessible in multiple places, changing it in one place affects multiple places...
So I suppose bad Java programmers would miss this point, but I don't think that's the fault of Java, certainly not when Java itself makes you so painfully aware of what's really going on, so often.
My intro to philosophy course actually had the balls to say "Descartes had some interesting ideas, and he's important, so we'll study him, but his argument for the existence for God is a really bad argument."
It's only offtopic to those incapable of understanding the link.
The purpose of a forum is communication. If you're the only one who understands what you just said, you fail at communication and deserve whatever mod you get.
But sure, tell me what the fuck "photon flux density" has to do with generalists thinking they can teach any topic?
It's more because you have an ego that makes the most egotistical PHD I've ever met look humble by comparison.
Let me guess: You have a GED because high school was too stupid for you, and you never went through college because they're so far beneath you?
Easiest way to prove your point is to go through the system, beat it, and then you'll have your extra salary and people will pay attention when you say the system is broken.
Oh, and it's also because whatever you may or may not have accomplished, "I can grow things without light!" is a truly moronic statement on many levels. Your entire comment has the feel of people who (try to) build perpetual motion machines -- grossly exaggerating your claims, making truly amateur mistakes, while also shouting at the top of your lungs about how everyone else is the problem.
With all the problems identified in TFA, you think this is the worst part of today's mathematics teaching?
In high school, I spent one year homeschooling, taking correspondence courses from a community college. They had some absurdly simple problems -- probably algebra, but I'm not sure -- which I had to finish and practice to get a grade. So I did, and the entire time I spent on that math class was less than an hour a week.
By the time I got to college, experiences like this had given me an attitude similar to yours, only worse -- I thought I was such a smart person. And indeed, I could just read and understand what Calculus was about, especially after having some small amount of Calculus in high school. This class assigned homework, but it wasn't graded. The teacher warned on the first day of class that the homework, although not graded, is required.
I didn't listen, and I failed that class. I also ended up dropping out because of a similar attitude in Computer Science, English, and Philosophy.
Recently, I've gone back to college, and I actually put in the time to learn this stuff. In particular, Calculus 2, where we're first really taught to integrate, requires practice. Never mind that they didn't allow integral tables on the quizzes and exams -- even when you have them, you need to know which strategy you're going to apply to this problem, which formula might be even remotely relevant. The only way you can know this is if you've got enough practice that you can start to see the patterns -- so you see what's happening when your chosen u and v in an integration-by-parts aren't going to work, so you know not only that this problem will be a trig identity, but which one and how to apply it...
So it's one thing to have a general understanding of what integrals and derivatives actually are. I could probably even pull off a limit-of-the-difference-quotient integral if I had to, just from pure understanding, without needing endless repetition. But there is no way I could do integrals at all without hours and hours of practice, even though I understand perfectly well what they are, what they represent, and why they're so bloody difficult.
Now, it's possible that there are a few geniuses who actually don't need the practice. If so, they wouldn't have to do the homework in my college Calculus course, and they'd be even faster at breezing through any sort of practice without needing help. But if they exist, they're also fantastically rare, and I'd also guess they'd be the least likely to be discouraged from an education (self-taught or otherwise) in mathematics.
The people the system is most dramatically failing to reach are the people TFA is talking about, people who have no idea what math is really about, and who thus miss the relevance to their own field or to anything they want to do. They're not necessarily bad at math, but they do need practice, and they need just a bit more motivation for that practice than getting a passing grade in high-school algebra.
That's not what I said. I said it's analogous to GOTO. You're still working with the same ideas of locks, mutexes, basically trying to coordinate access to shared memory. Go to something like Erlang, and although memory is still shared under the hood (for speed), you're now working at the level of message passing and shared-nothing architecture.
It really is as profound a shift as the shift from GOTO to structured programming. Global variables and GOTO basically mean you can never know for sure what any one part of your program is doing without being aware of how the entire rest of the program is put together. Local variables and structured programming mean you can reason about one chunk of your program in isolation. That's exactly what Erlang "processes" gain you over threads -- you can reason about one chunk of your program in isolation, even assuming sequential operation, without having to think about what every other thread is doing at the same time.
But it'll be hard to beat Qt's threading interface.
I don't know much about Qt's threading, but does it offer anything dramatically different than locks and mutexes?
Tell you what: I'll go read about Qt's threading, and you go read about Erlang. Then we can come compare notes. But as far as structure and stability, I'll bet Erlang wins.
Even if it's possible, the question is whether I will. I generally write C, even C++, at about half the speed I write Java, which is already fairly slow. I still generate segfaults in C and C++, and I have yet to get a single one in Java, except where I connected via JNI to some code of my own that segfaulted.
And that's why the JVM is written in Java instead of C/C++ and assembly, right?
Erm, the real reason would be because Java needs the JVM to run. Or what would you run the JVM-written-in-Java on?
For what it's worth, just about all the other tools related to Java are written in Java, very few are written in C/C++ for a performance boost. For example, the Java compiler is written in Java.
But even if what you said was true, I'll gladly take a 40% hit any day of the week in exchange for not ever having another segfault, buffer overrun, or memory leak.
In general, quality and correctness have never been major concerns of the Ruby, and especially Rails, communities.
Is that why Rails won't even look at your patch unless you have a unit test proving it does what you say it does?
The Ruby and Rails communities consider things like monkey patching and duck typing to be acceptable in large-scale applications.
Duck typing yes, monkey patching no. It's awesome that monkey patching exists, but the Merb guys introduced the idea that if you couldn't write a Merb plugin you wanted to with the plugin API (that is, if you had to monkey-patch), it was a bug in Merb. Merb has since been merged into Rails, so the same should be true of Rails.
It's a horrible idea to change code at runtime, especially when that code is part of widely-used standard classes like String or even Object...
Define "at runtime." These modifications are made at the beginning of your program, and they're made in every Rails app. You know that if you're going to use Rails, you're going to have these things. (This being Rails, I bet there's a way to disable it, too.)
They also don't interfere with any other usage of those core classes, to the point where one or two have actually been adopted into the language. It is a good thing that Ruby allows you to fix problems with the core language.
And compare to pretty much any Java servlet environment. Oracle's WebLogic, for instance, entirely stripped out and replaced the (working) SSL stuff and replaced it with their own broken shit that couldn't handle wildcard certificates. The only mechanism they provide for undoing that is to write your own HostnameVerifier and sort of monkey-patch it back to working the way it did.
So, talking about just the core hacks:
Not only does it reduce the quality of your own code,
How so?
it can easily affect completely independent libraries your app may be using.
Name one which is affected by this.
Then there are the ActiveRecord shenanigans.
Not going to try to defend this too much, as I use DataMapper, but...
It makes Ruby developers think they don't need even a basic understanding of relational databases, so they have no idea what it's actually doing under the hood.
That's too bad, but that's not the point.
The fact that something enables shitty code is irrelevant. The question is, what can a good developer do with it? Does it enable awesome code, or does it actively discourage it, the way some platforms do?
Well, that'll happen when your ORM fucks up and pulls in 1.5 million records into memory just to do some filtering that could have easily been done in the database.
You can as easily do this with any decent ORM. The point is that you shouldn't ever do that, because you should have an understading of how the underlying technology works. As Joel Spolsky says, "the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning."
See, I know SQL, and ActiveRecord and DataMapper make me more productive than writing raw SQL. If I didn't know SQL, yeah, I'd probably write some ActiveRecord that'd really suck.
I'd rather have CPAN's thousands of modules, most of which are extremely high quality and reliable, versus a larger number of shitty Ruby "gems".
I'd rather have thousands of high quality modules in a language I like, even if I have to sort through which ones are shitty or not (I actually like being able to make that call myself), rather than a language which looks shitty on its best days (and can be made to look like line noise).
Slashdot Mirror
The presence indicator, it does with Google Talk, as you pointed out -- which means it does so with the Jabber protocol. Indeed, this only really works if someone has a Jabber account which matches their email address -- which you get for free with GMail.
So that actually kind of proves my point.
The email itself, if by "close to instant" you mean "maybe minutes before you get it", sorry, that's not instant. That's why there's a separate IM in GMail (Google Talk) which is actually instant, and again, uses Jabber.
You can't really do these kinds of tricks with SMTP alone. It's possible you could get stuff to happen instantly, but SMTP is both overkill and actually unsuited to that use. You certainly aren't going to get presence.
Not to mention, it kind of looked like they were running some sort of BASIC on top of JavaScript...
Actually, IM is legitimately different than email, which has no presence notification, and certainly isn't instant in pretty much any implementation I've seen. We also have Jabber now, so IM doesn't have to be a walled garden.
I do agree about SMS, but once upon a time, it actually made sense to have something entirely different for the cellular networks. My original problem with SMS was that it was a way to nickel and dime you to death -- but now I've got an unlimited SMS plan, so it doesn't matter. It's still significantly easier for a cell network to handle a quick SMS message than an always-on Internet connection, so it's still cheaper for me to send text messages than spring for internet access on my phone.
And while I've never seen anyone tie email to Jabber, it's certainly possible, though I can't imagine it'd be fun to use.
I actually agree with the other poster's comment about walled gardens, and I do agree that making a new walled garden that's deliberately not interoperable is backwards and evil. However, just because something is a way to exchange messages which happen to be composed of text doesn't mean it's the same medium or deserves the same protocol.
Case in point: Wave was an attempt to unify forums, email, instant messaging, basically all online communication, and I really wanted to like it. It failed miserably.
Replace the shell stuff with "any word processor." And there are online, free word processors.
You'd think anyone smart enough to apply for college would at least know how to copy and paste.
Only difficult if you're actually behind a NAT.
Just one more reason to stop pussyfooting around with NAT and actually switch to IPv6.
If we both use a POTS number, that kind of defeats the point of VOIP in the first place -- Skype computer-to-computer calls, for instance, are free aside from the bandwidth used.
If we don't, there's no way to connect us. By contrast, if Skype used some sort of standard, I could actually switch to a new service and bring all my Skype contacts. In other words, people are stuck with Skype the same way they're stuck with Facebook, with the various non-Jabber Instant Messaging services, and so on -- but not the same way they're stuck with, for instance, email.
Can't believe no one's mentioned this yet.
All Skype does is connect users and punch holes in NATs. Take something at least standard (like SIP), if not peer-to-peer, and you don't have massive failures just because one VOIP provider goes down.
My point was that this kind of move in general never works well. Before we even consider whether BYTE could work, does brand-recycling ever work?
in C/C++ the type of a reference/pointer to something is syntactically different than the type of a value to the same thing
Not really. In particular, C++'s "reference" types are syntactically identical other than their declaration. The only difference is at object creation, and that has far less to do with whether it's a reference or not than it does with whether it's on the heap or not.
That is, the difference here:
C c(...);
That's on the stack, which means it'll be cleaned up when it falls out of scope, which means I don't have to delete it, but I better not leave any references to it around. This one:
C *c = new C(...);
That's on the heap, which means I better be sure it gets deleted somewhere. But that's about it. Nothing's stopping me from doing things like, for instance:
C &c = new C(...);
Now the only meaningful difference is that I have to remember to delete it.
if have you ever discussed programming with someone who started coding in Java, then you know what I mean :)
I don't know, the people I've talked to who started in Java and then learned C seem to be doing alright -- probably largely because when we teach them Java, we force them to come face-to-face with the concept of references and == vs equals.
I myself started in QBASIC. The most confusion I see is when people who've started in something like C++ start using something like Ruby, and they want to know about "pass-by-reference" vs "pass-by-value", so I have to actually make them unlearn everything they know about manual memory management and just start thinking in terms of objects.
Yeah, I'm a bit sick of brand-recycling in general. Even if they were good, there's a good chance fans of the original would be disappointed -- nostalgia is a capricious thing.
Huh.
I'm in a BS school now which has multiple categories they demand (for well-roundedness), does allow Spanish, and my experience so far is a decent administration who more or less knows what they're doing.
They also offer software engineering, which is much more tightly focused on computer science, engineering, and really nothing else. This is because the software engineering degree is from the College of Engineering, while the computer science degree is from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
In any case, I'd have to say that's a problem with the schools you were in. I'd recommend ignoring BA vs BS and just find a school you like. Then, if they offer both, maybe go for the BS.
In that situation there are no moral certainties you can use to decide what to do. The major religions can't help you. The only thing you can do is judge each cause by your feelings and the weight you assign it.
Bullshit.
Certainly, the major religions may not be able to help you, but that's hardly news, and you're presenting subjectivism as the only alternative? Simple utilitarianism could resolve this dilemma.
I don't necessarily disagree that in this situation, a subjectivist approach might be a good idea, but it's far from the only thing you can do, and there's no reason you can't resolve it with an absolute, provided you've accepted an absolute ethical system.
Huh?
In Java, you have to look no farther than the == operator. It compares the primitive type, and thus, if you apply to objects, it will only compare the references, not the objects. Having an understanding of this sort of thing is basically required, because to do any sort of meaningful comparison, you have to do:
a == b
if it's something primitive, like ints, but if it's an object, you have to do:
a.equals(b)
Worse still, you can't just make everything an object and forget about it -- then what happens when you've got null? Now you need:
(a == null && b == null) || a.equals(b)
This is something which makes no sense unless you understand the dichotomy between an object reference (which can, in fact, be null) and an object itself (which cannot). It's also critical for understanding why if the same object is accessible in multiple places, changing it in one place affects multiple places...
So I suppose bad Java programmers would miss this point, but I don't think that's the fault of Java, certainly not when Java itself makes you so painfully aware of what's really going on, so often.
My intro to philosophy course actually had the balls to say "Descartes had some interesting ideas, and he's important, so we'll study him, but his argument for the existence for God is a really bad argument."
It's only offtopic to those incapable of understanding the link.
The purpose of a forum is communication. If you're the only one who understands what you just said, you fail at communication and deserve whatever mod you get.
But sure, tell me what the fuck "photon flux density" has to do with generalists thinking they can teach any topic?
It may provide but does it make it to the people that require it?
Neither does yours.
The difference is, the people who are actually feeding the world don't have delusions about doing it without light.
Something apparently beyond your comprehension.
Nope, just beyond your communication skills.
It's more because you have an ego that makes the most egotistical PHD I've ever met look humble by comparison.
Let me guess: You have a GED because high school was too stupid for you, and you never went through college because they're so far beneath you?
Easiest way to prove your point is to go through the system, beat it, and then you'll have your extra salary and people will pay attention when you say the system is broken.
Oh, and it's also because whatever you may or may not have accomplished, "I can grow things without light!" is a truly moronic statement on many levels. Your entire comment has the feel of people who (try to) build perpetual motion machines -- grossly exaggerating your claims, making truly amateur mistakes, while also shouting at the top of your lungs about how everyone else is the problem.
Grow up.
With all the problems identified in TFA, you think this is the worst part of today's mathematics teaching?
In high school, I spent one year homeschooling, taking correspondence courses from a community college. They had some absurdly simple problems -- probably algebra, but I'm not sure -- which I had to finish and practice to get a grade. So I did, and the entire time I spent on that math class was less than an hour a week.
By the time I got to college, experiences like this had given me an attitude similar to yours, only worse -- I thought I was such a smart person. And indeed, I could just read and understand what Calculus was about, especially after having some small amount of Calculus in high school. This class assigned homework, but it wasn't graded. The teacher warned on the first day of class that the homework, although not graded, is required.
I didn't listen, and I failed that class. I also ended up dropping out because of a similar attitude in Computer Science, English, and Philosophy.
Recently, I've gone back to college, and I actually put in the time to learn this stuff. In particular, Calculus 2, where we're first really taught to integrate, requires practice. Never mind that they didn't allow integral tables on the quizzes and exams -- even when you have them, you need to know which strategy you're going to apply to this problem, which formula might be even remotely relevant. The only way you can know this is if you've got enough practice that you can start to see the patterns -- so you see what's happening when your chosen u and v in an integration-by-parts aren't going to work, so you know not only that this problem will be a trig identity, but which one and how to apply it...
So it's one thing to have a general understanding of what integrals and derivatives actually are. I could probably even pull off a limit-of-the-difference-quotient integral if I had to, just from pure understanding, without needing endless repetition. But there is no way I could do integrals at all without hours and hours of practice, even though I understand perfectly well what they are, what they represent, and why they're so bloody difficult.
Now, it's possible that there are a few geniuses who actually don't need the practice. If so, they wouldn't have to do the homework in my college Calculus course, and they'd be even faster at breezing through any sort of practice without needing help. But if they exist, they're also fantastically rare, and I'd also guess they'd be the least likely to be discouraged from an education (self-taught or otherwise) in mathematics.
The people the system is most dramatically failing to reach are the people TFA is talking about, people who have no idea what math is really about, and who thus miss the relevance to their own field or to anything they want to do. They're not necessarily bad at math, but they do need practice, and they need just a bit more motivation for that practice than getting a passing grade in high-school algebra.
there is no need for GOTO in there either.
That's not what I said. I said it's analogous to GOTO. You're still working with the same ideas of locks, mutexes, basically trying to coordinate access to shared memory. Go to something like Erlang, and although memory is still shared under the hood (for speed), you're now working at the level of message passing and shared-nothing architecture.
It really is as profound a shift as the shift from GOTO to structured programming. Global variables and GOTO basically mean you can never know for sure what any one part of your program is doing without being aware of how the entire rest of the program is put together. Local variables and structured programming mean you can reason about one chunk of your program in isolation. That's exactly what Erlang "processes" gain you over threads -- you can reason about one chunk of your program in isolation, even assuming sequential operation, without having to think about what every other thread is doing at the same time.
But it'll be hard to beat Qt's threading interface.
I don't know much about Qt's threading, but does it offer anything dramatically different than locks and mutexes?
Tell you what: I'll go read about Qt's threading, and you go read about Erlang. Then we can come compare notes. But as far as structure and stability, I'll bet Erlang wins.
Citation needed.
Even if it's possible, the question is whether I will. I generally write C, even C++, at about half the speed I write Java, which is already fairly slow. I still generate segfaults in C and C++, and I have yet to get a single one in Java, except where I connected via JNI to some code of my own that segfaulted.
Yep, and it's a problem which increases when you replace real sex ed with abstinence-only education. Clearly, making it taboo is counterproductive.
And that's why the JVM is written in Java instead of C/C++ and assembly, right?
Erm, the real reason would be because Java needs the JVM to run. Or what would you run the JVM-written-in-Java on?
For what it's worth, just about all the other tools related to Java are written in Java, very few are written in C/C++ for a performance boost. For example, the Java compiler is written in Java.
But even if what you said was true, I'll gladly take a 40% hit any day of the week in exchange for not ever having another segfault, buffer overrun, or memory leak.
And I don't even like Java.
Java multithreading is barely better than C++. It's analogous to GOTO. If you want something more structured, try Erlang.
In general, quality and correctness have never been major concerns of the Ruby, and especially Rails, communities.
Is that why Rails won't even look at your patch unless you have a unit test proving it does what you say it does?
The Ruby and Rails communities consider things like monkey patching and duck typing to be acceptable in large-scale applications.
Duck typing yes, monkey patching no. It's awesome that monkey patching exists, but the Merb guys introduced the idea that if you couldn't write a Merb plugin you wanted to with the plugin API (that is, if you had to monkey-patch), it was a bug in Merb. Merb has since been merged into Rails, so the same should be true of Rails.
It's a horrible idea to change code at runtime, especially when that code is part of widely-used standard classes like String or even Object...
Define "at runtime." These modifications are made at the beginning of your program, and they're made in every Rails app. You know that if you're going to use Rails, you're going to have these things. (This being Rails, I bet there's a way to disable it, too.)
They also don't interfere with any other usage of those core classes, to the point where one or two have actually been adopted into the language. It is a good thing that Ruby allows you to fix problems with the core language.
And compare to pretty much any Java servlet environment. Oracle's WebLogic, for instance, entirely stripped out and replaced the (working) SSL stuff and replaced it with their own broken shit that couldn't handle wildcard certificates. The only mechanism they provide for undoing that is to write your own HostnameVerifier and sort of monkey-patch it back to working the way it did.
So, talking about just the core hacks:
Not only does it reduce the quality of your own code,
How so?
it can easily affect completely independent libraries your app may be using.
Name one which is affected by this.
Then there are the ActiveRecord shenanigans.
Not going to try to defend this too much, as I use DataMapper, but...
It makes Ruby developers think they don't need even a basic understanding of relational databases, so they have no idea what it's actually doing under the hood.
That's too bad, but that's not the point.
The fact that something enables shitty code is irrelevant. The question is, what can a good developer do with it? Does it enable awesome code, or does it actively discourage it, the way some platforms do?
Well, that'll happen when your ORM fucks up and pulls in 1.5 million records into memory just to do some filtering that could have easily been done in the database.
You can as easily do this with any decent ORM. The point is that you shouldn't ever do that, because you should have an understading of how the underlying technology works. As Joel Spolsky says, "the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning."
See, I know SQL, and ActiveRecord and DataMapper make me more productive than writing raw SQL. If I didn't know SQL, yeah, I'd probably write some ActiveRecord that'd really suck.
I'd rather have CPAN's thousands of modules, most of which are extremely high quality and reliable, versus a larger number of shitty Ruby "gems".
I'd rather have thousands of high quality modules in a language I like, even if I have to sort through which ones are shitty or not (I actually like being able to make that call myself), rather than a language which looks shitty on its best days (and can be made to look like line noise).
Basically, Sinatra, Nokogiri, an