Why are there so many unmaintainable applications written in PHP and Perl?
Because PHP and Perl let undisciplined, inexperienced programmers write
useful code. So does Ruby -- but give it the popularity and longevity of PHP
and Perl (at least in English-speaking circles) and I bet you'll see plenty
of bad code written in Ruby too.

This seems like a variant of the Hackers and Painters fallacy. (Paul Graham
is rich. Paul Graham writes Lisp. Therefore everyone who writes Lisp will
get rich.) "All of the good, smart programmers I know are using Ruby. They
write good code. Therefore you can't write bad code in Ruby!"

It feels like there's another fallacy in there somewhere. I want to call it
the Pre-Post-Java Blindspot, where Java was the beginning of Serious
Programming Languages and only its successor will unseat it. (Like any good
fallacy, you have to ignore history, such as the fact that Ruby's between 10
and 12 years old.)

(I mean, if you really just can't read regular expressions, why not admit
it? You could start a twelve-step program or something.)

chromatic in http://xrl.us/iyzb