Hope for another good 25 years :) if I can I will keep programming in it in my 50s and 60s.
Happy Birthday, Ruby
21–30 of 239 posts
Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby
#22Ruby 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…
> having two distinctly different types of strings
You must be talking about Python 2, the deprecated version for 12 years now, with support ending next year.
Because last time I checked, current, modern Python only has one type of string.
Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby
#23This should have " (2018)" in the title.
My first reaction was "2018 was only 10 days ago!" But then I clicked the link and saw the article is from February 2018, so Ruby is nearly 26 now.
Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby
#24There is one thing I really dislike about Ruby (and other languages like Scala that have the same feature), and it's non-parenthetical function invocation. I get that it's good for writing DSLs and similar endeavors, and you're only supposed to use them where its implicit what you're doing, but in my opinion, it really hurts readability (though Scala is much worse when it comes to flexible yet opaque syntax).
Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby
#25Ruby 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.
pluralization seems to be somewhat orthogonal to the "no standards" issue you raise; one could have introduced standard rules to help with that 'wild west' and still left out pluralization. pluralization brings with it runtime overhead and edge cases (which can be dealt with with more runtime overhead, of course).
Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby
#26Ruby 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…
> 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
How do you define regular? I use both Ruby and JS almost daily, and have previously used Java and python for several years. I find ruby a joy to use and have no issues with 'familiarity'
Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby
#27Ruby 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.
I was taught singular table names back in the 90s, and as far as I remember it was the convention everywhere prior to Rails becoming endemic. And AFAIK it's what Codd and other relational luminaries mandated.
Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> having two distinctly different types of strings You must be talking about Python 2, the deprecated version for 12 years now, with support ending next year. Because last time I checked, current, modern Python only has one type of string.
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Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby
#29I'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…
Wouldn't Crystal fit the bill for a fast compiled language explicitly designed to emulate Ruby's syntax?
(I don't have any significant Ruby or Crystal experience, so if there are reasons why that doesn't fit the bill, I'm sorry)
Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby
#30After 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 agree with the other poster who says it's mature, not in decline (so maybe that's boring to the crowd that likes to always hop to the latest tech). Basically most of the kinks have been fixed and desired features have been added, and now it's about gradual improvements and adding new functionality as it comes. Students also commonly learn Python and Javascript in college and are probably more active on social media like HN.
I think Rails is the obvious choice for backend apis these days. It's robust, takes care of most of the hard stuff, saves you time and mistakes. Use whatever you want for frontend (React for me) in tandem with it. Many of the job postings I've seen have listed Rails + React.
It used to get accused of scaling poorly, but tell that to Github, Gitlab, and other large-scale sites with millions of users. It's true that bad Ruby is slower than bad Java, but the solution is to write cleaner code.
I know this was all about Rails. I use Ruby for scripting work as well, and it's enjoyable to use.