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Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

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Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#51

Post by noodle »

> Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

Probably not anytime soon, depending on your definition of "comeback", though ruby is still chugging along just fine IMO. There are more IPO'd ruby-based companies out there now than there ever have been before. (edit: and many non-ipo successful exits where ruby usage is maintained)

> However, I see some attractive features in Ruby 3, do you think that's enough to get a comeback?

No, just a few nice additions to the language won't create any pop in popularity in any language.

> My main concern is jobs availability, as an employer I find it harder and harder to find good RoR developers and they become super expensive.

This is just a problem with tech jobs in general. I've had the same problem hiring JS devs, and they're the most plentiful. I also had the same problem 10 years ago staffing up RoR teams. Its not a new problem. It largely just depends on your definition of "good".

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#52

Post by Zababa »

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…

The htmldriven website is really weird. The "tool" section is entirely composed of thing to emulate a Javascript-heavy frontend. I would expect to see server-side rendered HTML frameworks.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#53

Post by gtaylor »

johntdaly wrote: post #27
nicoburns wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sort of see where you are coming from but as somebody that used PHP in the past and has left I can’t really get myself to look there. Now when it comes to Python and Django I’m not so sure. I’ve read a couple of articles where some of the Django users where annoyed that in their opinion there isn’t enough development/new stuff in the Django. Personally I think the biggest problem is that none of the MVC frameworks…

re: Django, it continues to chug along but is at this point a very mature ecosystem. There are larger things in the works (like the async support effort), but they tend to be gradually rolled out.

It's not going to score points for being flashy, but is a healthy tech and community. Hard to beat as a safe default if you don't already have strong preferences and are working in Python!

Plenty of jobs to be had, too.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#54

Post by dvogel »

herbst wrote: post #2

I don't think Ruby 3 will change anything with that. I am one of those who never jumped the boat and still doing their daily coding with ruby, rails & co. The ecosystem changed a lot, as it always did. Many youngsters learn that single language works everywhere, learn that server and frontend may share their code. If they end up using Rails they likely spend more time in their react files than anywhere else. The reas…

One of the biggest issues ruby faces is performance. The productivity of the language is undeniable. That is a big reason start-ups so often choose ruby. Eventually Salesforce or Microsoft acquires these ruby start-ups though that the apps run up against enterprise managers who have traditional baroque "cost optimization" incentives. Very few people, especially managers, are comfortable making the argument that paying for more machines is better than paying for more cheaper devs so you see these successful apps rewritten in java, C#, etc. Someone shows execs a chart with costs per user plummeting (usually with a deceptive Y axis), everyone pats each other on the back, and then they lament not being able to find ruby devs when they acquire the next company. I'm hopeful that ruby can close the perf gap enough to slow/stop this weird cycle.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#55

Post by yngvizzle »

izietto wrote: post #16
bradleyankrom wrote: post #12

Anecdotal, but in my industry (sports front office), we’ve seen a heavy shift from Rails to Python over the last few years. I don’t think it’s much to do with perceived shortcomings with Ruby/Rails, but rather alignment with what the analytics side of operations uses. Front office R&D groups (typically comprised of systems and analytics) are relatively small, and there’s a fair amount of collaboration between devs an…

May I ask you what are the tools and/or features that Python offers and Ruby does not? It'd be interesting to invest resources on it, given that Python is not very different from Ruby

As wgj says, it's mainly that Python easily interfaces with other languages without having to copy data. This means that we can use a vast amount of highly efficient mathematical libraries written in C, C++ and Fortran.

NumPy and SciPy are the main workhorses of numerical programming with Python, and provide bindings to extremely efficient libraries (mainly a BLAS and LAPACK implementation), that utilizes SIMD parallelism, adaptive thread parallelism based on workload and cache optimal algorithms to minimise communication between the CPU and RAM.

this gives Python multidimensional arrays that have the flexibility of Python types and speed we can only dream of obtaining if we wrote the low-level code ourselves.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#56

Post by didip »

I think the boat has sailed, particularly on RoR.

1. On the ease to test front, most new languages have built-in easy testing tools. `go test` is so darn easy. These new languages offer less ceremonial type system as well.

2. Most of the new languages are an order of magnitude faster.

3. Newer frameworks have more interesting things to offer. For example, Phoenix on Elixir.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#57

Post by mohanmcgeek »

bestinterest wrote: post #37
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked in both rails and JavaScript ecosystems, this is untrue. Running on rails not only increases Dev expense but also the operational expense since you would need more servers to handle a similar load. (Correct me if this has changed with Ruby 3)

Not sure I agree on the operational aspect in the large scheme of things. Servers are cheap, people are expensive. Thinking out loud here, say you can only serve 200rqs with Rails but 2000rqs in some other framework (yes not fair comparison, endpoints matter etc etc). That means you need 10x the servers but take a step back a sec. 200rqs is 720k a hour or 17,280,00 a day or 518,400,000 requests a month. (The scale fo…

This has always been the argument of people optimising for development speed. Fair argument when you're actually getting dev speed in return. But it's mostly consulting companies making this argument, who don't have any skin in the game for ops cost.

If this were true, startups wouldn't be paying a third of the money they raised to AWS.. considerably more than people cost.

Companies grow and this 1/10th efficiency will quickly multiply.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#58

Post by mohanmcgeek »

mywittyname wrote: post #42
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was.

While I was using Rails for web dev, I was using python for Gtk apps.. Ubuntu had a visual Gtk app creator. I forgot what it was called. It generated python code by default. That whole Linux app ecosystem was python for a while. Then there was a brief period of Vala being used for this. Not sure what they use these days

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#59

Post by going_to_800 »

didip wrote: post #56

I think the boat has sailed, particularly on RoR. 1. On the ease to test front, most new languages have built-in easy testing tools. `go test` is so darn easy. These new languages offer less ceremonial type system as well. 2. Most of the new languages are an order of magnitude faster. 3. Newer frameworks have more interesting things to offer. For example, Phoenix on Elixir.

2. faster as speed or development? Gem ecosystem in Ruby makes it super fast to develop stuff, I'm not sure is there any ecosystem that rich with up to date libraries.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#60

Post by Zababa »

going_to_800 wrote: post #59
didip wrote: post #56

I think the boat has sailed, particularly on RoR. 1. On the ease to test front, most new languages have built-in easy testing tools. `go test` is so darn easy. These new languages offer less ceremonial type system as well. 2. Most of the new languages are an order of magnitude faster. 3. Newer frameworks have more interesting things to offer. For example, Phoenix on Elixir.

2. faster as speed or development? Gem ecosystem in Ruby makes it super fast to develop stuff, I'm not sure is there any ecosystem that rich with up to date libraries.

> Gem ecosystem in Ruby makes it super fast to develop stuff, I'm not sure is there any ecosystem that rich with up to date libraries.

Pretty much every ecosystem has a package manager and ecosystem, I don't think Ruby is anything unique here.

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