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Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

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Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#41

Post by mywittyname »

iKnowKungFoo wrote: post #23
kinduff wrote: post #11

Ruby and Rails Engineer here, for a decade now. I had the fortune to be part of new startups that chose RoR for all the good reasons, but also because at the time it was trendy. Nowadays I keep finding RoR jobs but I see more and more legacy applications that need to be maintained in order to move to a new technology. I've had some discussions with founders and they always mention the same problem: there are not a lo…

"Nowadays I keep finding RoR jobs but I see more and more legacy applications that need to be maintained in order to move to a new technology." This is exactly the situation with a number of long-standing, formerly popular languages. ColdFusion and PHP jump to mind. They're fine languages and people love them, but if no one's paying, why bother sticking to them? Loving a programming language doesn't pay the bills. "I…

> This is exactly the situation with a number of long-standing, formerly popular languages.

This is also not new. I've replaced a number of "legacy" apps because, basically, it was too hard to find devs for the current language. This was happening with perl in the early 2000s, PHP in the 2010s, Ruby now. Java has gone through surges and waning of support over the years. When I was a fresh devs, the old timers told me about this thing called serverside javascript.

This kind of thing is inevitable. It is something that businesses just need to plan for, because it can happen with established languages (PHP) just as easily as it can for trendy ones. And you can't predict future generation's attitudes towards tech.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#42

Post by mywittyname »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #26
jstx1 wrote: post #7

Meta question - has any language ever made a comeback? Not in terms of quality or features (many have had significant improvements obviously) but in terms of adoption and getting back to the spot of "this is one of the go-to languages to do x".

I would put python in this category. Back in the RoR days, python had a very second class status in the web community. There were some famous web 2.0 companies that are using django. All the limelight was on Rails. These days, python is probably the second most popular langauge for after JavaScript in number of repos and maybe the go-to language for first time Devs. (Thanks to Zed Shaw) And there are significantly mo…

Python was kind of a cult-popular language in the 2000s. I did as much work as I could get away with in it; mostly system-level nuts and bolts kind of things, but also web apps.

Django 1.2 was the killer app that made it so much easier to sell to teams. But by then, I think RoR was more fashionable.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#43

Post by Zababa »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #35
johntdaly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can any language make a comeback to its original popularity? I would argue they can’t because they where overhyped. I’m not interested in getting back to the overhyped level of popularity. That kept me away from Ruby on Rails for a while. But getting to a “mature” point where we can admin, no we are not dying and yes we are one of the better solutions for web development, would be nice. Also the job market adjust to…

Ruby will not make a comback ever again. Maybe as configuration language. We (web dev, UI dev, game dev) need simple, fast stuff, something Go like but better. Maybe Swift? (haven't used Swift). Maybe V will deliver in the end.

> Maybe Swift? (haven't used Swift).

Swift is really slow for web stuff.

> We (web dev, UI dev, game dev) need simple, fast stuff, something Go like but better.

Do you think "we" need something faster than Go for web stuff? Go is already fast enough for most use cases.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#44

Post by Zababa »

nicoburns wrote: post #15
johntdaly wrote: post #3

I’m a Ruby (and Rails) developer and currently write node.js code. A friend of mine that I worked with that is also a Ruby (and Rails) developer is currently working as a Python developer. I am more than willing to switch back and so is my friend. Ruby (and Rails) was fun to us and that is lacking in our current jobs. I personally am stunned when I compare the developments in Rails to the developments I see in the no…

I think the main problem for Ruby isn't Node.js, go, Rust, etc. None of those ecosystems have anything comparable to Rails. The problem is Laravel (PHP) and Django (Python) which both offer a comparable (if not better in many ways) experience to Rails with access to much bigger ecosystems.

> None of those ecosystems have anything comparable to Rails.

Rails has nothing comparable to React or the performance of Go. Laravel and Python are just alternatives to Rails, which suffers from the same issues, although Python has a lot of C/C++/Fortran bindings for some heavy stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#45

Post by mywittyname »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #33
b20000 wrote: post #19

if nobody uses ruby then why are the devs super expensive? you would think that there is no demand?

FORTRAN devs are also pretty expensive. There are fewer people who can write FORTRAN and there is a lack of allure to a job that involves maintaining legacy code. Sadly a lot of Ruby code written in 2010ish is also considered "Legacy" code and even people who previously did Ruby don't want to do it, not because of any destestment of the language. One company even specifically asked me if I would be "okay" with writin…

People who need to write FORTRAN are also very specialized in other technical capacities. FORTRAN is used a lot in high performance scientific & engineering computing. So companies are paying for the ability of a person to grok the high level mathematics necessary to justify using FORTRAN.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#46

Post by horsawlarway »

As someone who missed the early Rails train, I'm not really seeing a lot to love anymore.

It seems like Rails tried to do exactly what MSFT was doing with ASP.net - Give an excellent set of defaults you don't have to think about.

The problem with that (and it's the same problem in Rails) is that "excellent defaults" change rapidly - much more rapidly than most production code-bases.

So you end up with outdated defaults, and documentation fragments everywhere (this is actually FAR worse in Rails, because ruby hands you a million and a half ways to accomplish most tasks).

The end result is a framework with a ton of baggage, poor documentation, and riddled with "That way is not proper anymore" style footguns.

It's quick to knock stuff out with, but the second your team is bigger than 10 devs - Rails is a fucking ugly beast.

Honestly - ASP.net was crap, and I prefer it to modern rails on large teams.

---

So no - I personally don't see Ruby making a big comeback anytime soon, since its poster child - Rails - kinda sucks these days (and no disrespect to the authors, I think this problem is unavoidable in frameworks that give opinionated defaults - 1 set of opinionated defaults is awesome, 6 different sets of opinionated defaults that are no longer compatible is fugly, but if you don't update your opinionated defaults the framework rots anyways.)

That said - I actually quite like Ruby as a scripting language. I just really wish it hadn't become so tightly bound to Rails.

Just like I quite enjoy C# compared to java, but I still don't want to write ASP.net applications.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#47

Post by plainnoodles »

I think the biggest challenges that Ruby faces are:

* No built-in type hinting (you have to reach for Sorbet which is a lot more than just hinting) * developer ecosystem seems to struggle to get gravity around anything that's not web-related.

Python has so much diversity of packages. You need simplex noise? Package. You need a terminal ui library? Yep. You want to use wxwidgets or qt? Yep and yep. You want to do computer vision? yep.

Ruby can check some of those boxes, to be fair, but ime the ruby solution tends to be less-used, lower-quality, and more likely to just be thin bindings around the C APIs (if relevant) than a more holistic language-native implementation.

I'm a little sad because I honestly like Ruby more than python just from a language perspective. RubyGems alone are better than the trillion packaging solutions that python has churned out. I like ruby's preference for method chaining vs python's list/set/dict comprehensions (just look at what a "2-layer" list comprehension looks like :( )

Also, for the type-hinting thing, maybe it's just me, but the only reason I don't consider python to be a trap is because it added type hinting as a first-class thing. Eventually, as a project grows, you just need types sometimes. I don't like that Sorbet is a) third-party and b) pretty heavy-weight (does a lot more than just type hinting) and I also think it's just not as pretty (it's not part of the grammar so it has to be tacked on, like if python type hinting had to be done via decorators.

I know ruby recently adopted some kind of native type hinting thing, but it's in a separate file, right? Like adding typescript hints onto js code? I don't like that either, it's just going to rot. I haven't been following this closely though, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised there.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#50

Post by thijsvandien »

beamatronic wrote: post #29
recursivedoubts wrote: post #18

I have been working in RoR for a long time and, yes, it is being surpassed by other languages/frameworks, particularly python and, obviously, javascript. However, I think we are turning the corner on javascript-everywhere movement and that html-driven development is poised to make a big comeback: https://htmldriven.dev/ With the adoption of html-driven tools like hotwire, unpoly or my own project, htmx, the choice of…

I was a Servlet and JSP developer. I really miss it. I liked it. I was good at it.

And you were really... alive?
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