As much as I love using Ruby, it’s become more frustrating over time. Developers are feeling this, and as a tester, I’ve had my share as well. This article, passed on by James Ladd sums things up for me (for testing, as well as development).
The best example of this in the Watir space is probably here – http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Pop+Ups. I recently lost half a day because apparently Watir’s ‘click_no_wait’ doesn’t work in the release version of the 1.8.6 Windows one-click installer. Of course, you have to use the beta release that came out after the 1.8.6 release, which is a bit trickier to find now that the one-click installer is not really supported (there’s a new Windows installer).
Let’s hope things start to stabilise again soon.
Authors bio is coming up shortly.
I feel your pain. I’ve been doing more work in Python and Java as a result. I prefer the syntax in Ruby over Python, but for reliability, consistent coding conventions and library support, Python is more compelling.