My biggest gripe with Ruby is how much syntax is optional and the "accepted" conventions by the community are to leave out a lot of optional syntax.
The worst offender (in my opinion of course) is leaving out of empty parentheses on method calls. It makes it impossible to know if something is a property or a function. The argument is that it doesn't matter if it's a property or a function, but I feel like it makes it very difficult to reason about performance. If I know something is a function, I'll look at the function and see what the performance implications are. Where as if something is a property, I assume it's "free" to access. This doesn't hold when reading Ruby code, and I basically have to look up everything all the time.
Just my opinion as someone that had to switch between python/ruby/perl to maintain tools written during different decades.
> but I feel like it makes it very difficult to reason about performance
This seems like a form of premature optimization.
I mean, you're not wrong technically, but if you were exceptionally performance concerned, you probably wouldn't be using ruby.
If you're just regular performance concerned (i.e. you want to stop pathological behavior in the hot loop), you're really only concerned about 1-2% of your code. You wait until it's an issue, run a profiler over your code and optimize the couple of parts that are causing the issue.
The worst offender (in my opinion of course) is leaving out of empty parentheses on method calls. It makes it impossible to know if something is a property or a function. The argument is that it doesn't matter if it's a property or a function, but I feel like it makes it very difficult to reason about performance. If I know something is a function, I'll look at the function and see what the performance implications are. Where as if something is a property, I assume it's "free" to access. This doesn't hold when reading Ruby code, and I basically have to look up everything all the time.
Just my opinion as someone that had to switch between python/ruby/perl to maintain tools written during different decades.