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Happy Birthday, Ruby

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Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#11

Post by empath75 »

sho wrote: post #3

> Ruby isn't the most beautiful language out there Huh, I sure think it is. I wonder what the author thinks the competition might be? Ruby has its issues for sure, but aesthetics ain't one of them - far and away my favourite out of any major language.

I'm not sure what language would be more beautiful than ruby, to be honest, and it's not even my favorite language to use.

Let's do a mini code challenge in the thread -- implement fizzbuzz in the most beautiful way you can, in the most beautiful language you know:

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#12

Post by dmitriid »

empath75 wrote: post #11
sho wrote: post #3

> Ruby isn't the most beautiful language out there Huh, I sure think it is. I wonder what the author thinks the competition might be? Ruby has its issues for sure, but aesthetics ain't one of them - far and away my favourite out of any major language.

I'm not sure what language would be more beautiful than ruby, to be honest, and it's not even my favorite language to use. Let's do a mini code challenge in the thread -- implement fizzbuzz in the most beautiful way you can, in the most beautiful language you know:

Sounds like a question for Code Golf[1] :)

[1] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com

Off-topic, take a look at "Add a language to Polyglot" which was concluded at 194 languages, but people kept adding more: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/102370/add-a-la...

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#13

Post by kemenaran »

I'm currently working on a Ruby project, and I love the language so much! It's elegant, fast enough for me, and the ecosystem rocks.

It seems that, after Ruby borrowed from many previous languages, a lot of rubyisms went into Rust (the nice functional-style enumerations, the awesome package manager inspired by Bundler). And I'm thrilled the best of the Ruby world found its way into other languages.

A future where the elegance of the Ruby language is available both as an interpreted-scriptable tool (Ruby) or a compiled-statically-typed language (Rust) looks like a nice place to me.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#14

Post by sho »

loktarogar wrote: post #9

Ruby was my re-entry into programming. Before it, I had tried programming in highschool (c++) and, while I did well at it, felt like it wasn't for me. I was going to go into some other field like Photography instead. By chance I had to do a programming class in college, and they had put me into the wrong one by accident - a final year software project in Ruby. I did really well at it, fell in love with the language a…

Me too actually. I flirted with programming around uni-time and after - PHP, java, friggin' ada - and just couldn't see myself enjoying it so I went into network management instead.

10 years later I was thoroughly sick of that, so started to look around and heard about this little language called Ruby - and it was love at first sight. Then this little software project called Rails started to gain momentum and there was no looking back. 13 or so years and counting.

And now funnily enough just when I feel like Ruby is lacking a few necessities in our always-connected world, along comes a project which is basically reworking Erlang to look a whole lot more like Ruby - Elixir. I'll always love Ruby but Elixir feels right for the next step, that kind of instant attraction I never felt for the likes of golang. Here's to the next 13 or more years of Ruby-like programming joy!

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#15

Post by mbel »

dmitriid wrote: post #12
empath75 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what language would be more beautiful than ruby, to be honest, and it's not even my favorite language to use. Let's do a mini code challenge in the thread -- implement fizzbuzz in the most beautiful way you can, in the most beautiful language you know:

Sounds like a question for Code Golf[1] :) [1] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com Off-topic, take a look at "Add a language to Polyglot" which was concluded at 194 languages, but people kept adding more: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/102370/add-a-la...

Let's not forget about immortal RosettaCode: http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/FizzBuzz

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#16

Post by pavlov »

Ruby is the very least favorite of all the programming languages I've had to use regularly over my career.

Its syntax strongly favors cuteness over familiarity. Wherever Ruby can diverge from expectations to give you a pointless little tickle of whimsical inventiveness instead, it seems to do so.

Visually it looks like an unwanted love child of Pascal and Python. There's no clear rhyme or reason to the use of sigils and keywords.

The standard library and built-in types are acceptable for a mediocre '90s scripting language, I guess. The difference between symbols and strings as hashmap keys is a footgun that opens up endless bugs for the type of glue code that you'd often be writing in Ruby.

Probably the only thing that keeps Ruby afloat is Rails, an extremely resource-intensive web server framework built around assumptions of what web apps were like in 2003. Everything in Rails seems to happen by pooping magic keywords in your code or in file names according to mysterious conventions, so when something goes wrong, you'll have a hell of a time figuring out why Rails isn't calling your code or is generating broken SQL. OTOH it honors the Ruby tradition of doing lots of unexpected and useless cute things like pluralizing words in your database migrations [1].

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1185035/how-do-i-overrid...

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#17

Post by Rooster61 »

pavlov wrote: post #16

Ruby is the very least favorite of all the programming languages I've had to use regularly over my career. Its syntax strongly favors cuteness over familiarity. Wherever Ruby can diverge from expectations to give you a pointless little tickle of whimsical inventiveness instead, it seems to do so. Visually it looks like an unwanted love child of Pascal and Python. There's no clear rhyme or reason to the use of sigils…

> Its syntax strongly favors cuteness over familiarity.

Funny, I recently made a stack switch from Ruby to Python, and I had the exact opposite impression. Ruby coding style/syntax tends to favor convention over configuration (at least in terms of Rails setup), while Python to me seems less so.

Ruby also seems to me a bit more consistent across it's versions. One of the biggest gripes I've had about Python so far is how many things are broken across various versions of the language, and the odd way some issues have been handled (having two distinctly different types of strings with distinctly different syntax according to encoding for instance). Perhaps Ruby simply doesn't offer familiarity to you individually.

I'm more comfortable with Ruby as I used it much longer, so I may be biased, and I am not shitting on Python either. It has things I don't particularly dig, but that may be my own bias. Both languages have their pros and cons, and both are certainly viable as scripting languages in this particular epoch of programming.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#18

Post by DFHippie »

pavlov wrote: post #16

Ruby is the very least favorite of all the programming languages I've had to use regularly over my career. Its syntax strongly favors cuteness over familiarity. Wherever Ruby can diverge from expectations to give you a pointless little tickle of whimsical inventiveness instead, it seems to do so. Visually it looks like an unwanted love child of Pascal and Python. There's no clear rhyme or reason to the use of sigils…

>There's no clear rhyme or reason to the use of sigils and keywords.

You have trouble with the use of sigils in Ruby? That seems like an odd complaint. I would have expected you to complain more about MINWAN.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#19

Post by Rooster61 »

ausjke wrote: post #8

After 25 years it seems Ruby is in gradual decline these days? You will find one ruby related post at HN after reading 500 of Javascript and/or Python posts here for example.

I think this is more indicative of Rails falling out of favor that actual vanilla Ruby declining as a scripting language. Rails is Ruby's only real killer app framework, and it really isn't killer any more. It was pretty inevitable that enterprise Rails apps would go the way of the dodo once folks got wind of ActiveRecord's pretty awful scaling issues, and the fact that Ruby isn't overly performant compared to other popular scripting languages in and of itself.

I think the focus on Python these days has more to do with the fact that it's often the language people learn first these days, and the fact that it has effectively supplanted Perl as the swiss army chainsaw of scripting languages. I think Javascript is popular due to the fact that it is essentially the native scripting/programming language of the modern web (or at least it will be until WebAssembly really catches on), and the ridiculous preponderance of decent frameworks that are out there now for that language.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#20

Post by izietto »

pavlov wrote: post #16

Ruby is the very least favorite of all the programming languages I've had to use regularly over my career. Its syntax strongly favors cuteness over familiarity. Wherever Ruby can diverge from expectations to give you a pointless little tickle of whimsical inventiveness instead, it seems to do so. Visually it looks like an unwanted love child of Pascal and Python. There's no clear rhyme or reason to the use of sigils…

"pluralizing words in your database migrations" is ispired by convention over configuration pattern, and comes from an age where there weren't almost any standard rules, even table names were some singular, some plurals, some ALL_UPCASED, some all_downcased, some MiXeD, some dash-erized, some camel_ized, ... I come from that age and it helped a lot.
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