I am reluctant to say that the implementors of Ruby’s package did not know what they were doing, or something like that ... because that, quite obviously, would not be the case. Nevertheless, when you are about to embark across the desert sands, which do you prefer?   A sturdy beast of burden (perhaps with a few grey whiskers, and the tired-looking eyes which have guided the animal through this same journey for many years), or a newcomer?   The jewel might gleam brightly in the safety of the tent, but if you dropped the thing into the sands would you ever find it again?

I have been burned too-many times by well intentioned language systems that championed “the one right way to do it.”   Competently crafted though they might have been, by well-seasoned programmers, I simply have been burned, too many times.   Their “best way” was not exactly “the way I needed,” and suddenly I found myself sticking shims and wedges all over their mechanism, trying to get it to work.  

Also, I have learned to look with a very skeptical eye at anyone who says, in effect, that theirs is “The One Right Way.”   It sells seminars and textbooks, to be sure, but I just do not believe it anymore.   (And furthermore, it rarely applies:   nearly all of the software you are going to encounter is already in service and cannot be replaced, even with something that is “better.”)   Does the world really need yet another procedural programming language?   Have every one of the software engineers in the last fifty years really been “clooless?”