SAN FRANCISCO — A pointed new WIRED essay arguing that the Ruby programming language is “not a serious” tool has reignited an old fight in software circles, with Ruby developers calling the critique shallow, outdated and blind to how the language is actually used in production, Dec. 24, 2025.
The flashpoint is WIRED’s “Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language”, a column that frames Ruby as slow, overly permissive and largely kept alive by legacy systems and Ruby on Rails. Within days, the piece ricocheted across forums and social feeds, where engineers argued that “serious” is the wrong yardstick — and that the Ruby programming language remains a practical choice for teams optimizing for shipping speed and maintainability.
Ruby programming language in the crosshairs
What the backlash reveals is less about one essay and more about a recurring identity crisis: Is the Ruby programming language a declining relic of Web 2.0, or a stable, niche workhorse that has quietly improved while the industry chased newer abstractions?
Defenders point to tangible changes, not nostalgia. The core project has kept shipping major releases, including Ruby 3.4.0, which arrived with performance and runtime work that Rubyists say matters more than rhetorical drive-bys. The push for speed has been especially visible around YJIT, a just-in-time compiler that has moved from “interesting experiment” to something teams increasingly treat as standard operating procedure. Shopify’s engineering group, for example, has framed YJIT in Ruby 3.2 as production-ready based on real workloads.
Basecamp has reported similar gains in the Ruby programming language ecosystem, writing that its code ran about 18% faster with YJIT after enabling the compiler. Advocates say those improvements don’t erase Ruby’s tradeoffs, but they do undercut the simplest version of the “Ruby is slow” argument.
A debate with deep roots
This isn’t the first time Ruby’s relevance has been litigated in public. In 2013, Jeff Atwood made a pragmatic case for adoption in “Why Ruby?”, arguing that developer productivity and ecosystem fit can beat ideological purity. In 2017, the language’s origin story — and the motivations behind its design — was revisited in Two-Bit History’s “The Ruby Story”. That same year, the community even poked at its own anxieties in a conference talk bluntly titled “Ruby is Dead”.
Those earlier moments help explain why today’s dispute feels so familiar: the Ruby programming language has long invited strong opinions because it prioritizes readability and developer happiness — values that critics often dismiss as soft. Supporters counter that “soft” can be strategic, especially when teams are maintaining large codebases for years.
For now, the essay’s sharpest effect may be catalytic. By forcing Rubyists to defend the Ruby programming language in concrete terms — performance, tooling, hiring realities and longevity — the backlash has turned a cultural jab into a more measurable conversation about what “serious” software looks like in 2026.
