Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Happy Birthday, Ruby

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 239 posts

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#211

Post by eropple »

beforedawn wrote: post #177
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…

So true. Best was ActiveRecord, the most cumbersome ORM I have ever met, it could create 20 SQL requests out of a simple query. There must be a reason that Ruby dropped few places on Github's Octoverse 2018. While I was never against Ruby, every time has its tools, it was the culture of the Ruby community which I didn't like. Being a Rubyist was always a good excuse to not help on the frontend or help with some devop…

Meanwhile, every devops environment I've ever worked in has been Ruby-first, to the point where I learned Ruby specifically for devops work.

I get that you are new here, but this place isn't big on shitposting.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#212

Post by joelbluminator »

losvedir wrote: post #204
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I'm old, and have done lots of stuff in lots of languages in frameworks. For about a dozen years, Rails was my go-to toolkit. I've written a couple dozen production applications with it. Unfortunately, Rails has really fallen out of favor lately. Even a Rails-specialty shop I worked for briefly has pivoted to using ASP.NET. I've played around in that stack, and found it lacking. (EF just doesn't compete as an ORM…

> So, I'm honestly asking, as someone who hates Rails: What framework, out there, somewhere, allows me to be as productive as Rails, but which is are "better," somehow? I'm a former RoR developer (about 5 years) who's now been a full time Elixir developer for two years, so I'll make the obvious suggestion of Phoenix, which is very rails inspired. It's a little more clunky in the basics, but it has that "magical" feel…

Sounds nice, definitely not a game changer, the way websockets wasn't a game changer. I think being real time can be easily achieved with existing tools and it's somewhat overrated anyways.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#213

Post by joelbluminator »

eropple wrote: post #110
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I'm old, and have done lots of stuff in lots of languages in frameworks. For about a dozen years, Rails was my go-to toolkit. I've written a couple dozen production applications with it. Unfortunately, Rails has really fallen out of favor lately. Even a Rails-specialty shop I worked for briefly has pivoted to using ASP.NET. I've played around in that stack, and found it lacking. (EF just doesn't compete as an ORM…

So...eh. Ruby has the easiest data access tools, between ActiveRecord and Sequel (which I prefer), out there. I don't know too many folks who'd disagree with you about that. But where you're happy with Rails taking a few lines, I am as of late big on Kotlin (because I agree with you regarding Java) encouraging me to be correct . I'm building a new product using Spring Boot, Kotlin, and JDBI and while, yes, there's bo…

It's not just code bloat, typed languags and frameworks like spring have to dance through hoops to allow for easy testability. Spring is founded on the idea of dependency injection that's supposed to overcome that. In Rails/Python and friends you just don't need that, and consequently things have much less bloat.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#214

Post by joelbluminator »

zackmorris wrote: post #202
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…

Ok I'll bite. Ruby's biggest flaw is implicit context, due to its emphasis on convention over derivation. Which means that (for example) a developer new to Ruby/Rails won't know that paths are automatically generated from routes.rb, or how those routes and paths automagically connect to controller classes. It's not clear in the beginning how symbols relate to strings or why you would even want them (they are like enu…

You just never bothered digging into Rails and going through at least the majority of the documntation. I tried playing around with Spring, guess what? It sucks, the amount of reading you have to do just to try and get a hello world is immense. Agree about symbols though, that's not a good thing. Every language has mistakes though.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#215

Post by joelbluminator »

Rooster61 wrote: post #19
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…

Ever since the famous twitter drop out of Ruby/Rails many new enterprises adopted it. Gitlab, Stripe, Coinbase, these companis are worth tens of billions of dollars. I'm not talknig about the older generation (Shopify, Airbnb etc), but new successful companies that chose Ruby or Rails in the last 5 years. https://blog.planetargon.com/entries/18-companies-using-ruby...

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#216

Post by PurpleRamen »

ashelmire wrote: post #30
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 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…

Mature is a humble way to describe stagnancy. Something/one has stopped growing and will likely never become better than it is now. This is on shortterm no decline, but will longterm evolve into it.

For a programming-community this is very very bad. Programming is not only about the language itself, but also the libs, frameworks, tools, and that's what most enytrys about python or javascript are. When the community of Ruby on a nerd-meltingpot already is so low that they hardly share any content, then how much less recognition will they receive in more mundane and conservative communities?

Now less recognition will mean less new users, less new libs/frameworks/tools&support. Over time the existing users will move away or just die, which means the decline has started.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#217

Post by masklinn »

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:

I've always loved the case analysis of a case/match:

  [case (n `rem` 3 == 0, n `rem` 5 == 0) of
     (True, False) -> "Fizz"
     (False, True) -> "Buzz"
     (True, True) -> "FizzBuzz"
     (False, False) -> (show n)
  | n

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#219

Post by sametmax »

tomc1985 wrote: post #210
sametmax wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FUD is never easy to read, and I'm not always wise enough to answer in the proper tone. As I do a lot of Python for a living, and still work on both Python 2 and Python 3, I have talked a lot with people writing new P2 apps in the last few years. My experience is, either you have very niche constraints, or somebody made an unwise/uneducated engineering decision. Unfortunatly, I meet way more of the second type, and o…

Ours were niche constraints (legacy hardware still in-use), as I bet much of the world is. Oh the tyranny of libc... I would, however, like to question this wisdom of always having to run the latest and greatest. Yes there are security considerations but properly hardened, old software and runtimes run fine. You need an actually security guru, though, and not some startup promising turn-key solutions.

Yes, although at this point, Python 3 is hardly new. 12 years in IT is a long time.

Re: Happy Birthday, Ruby

#220

Post by Rooster61 »

sametmax wrote: post #203
tomc1985 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of shops still use Python 2 I was writing brand-new applications in it for my job as late as early last year Why the defiant tone?

FUD is never easy to read, and I'm not always wise enough to answer in the proper tone. As I do a lot of Python for a living, and still work on both Python 2 and Python 3, I have talked a lot with people writing new P2 apps in the last few years. My experience is, either you have very niche constraints, or somebody made an unwise/uneducated engineering decision. Unfortunatly, I meet way more of the second type, and o…

> FUD is never easy to read

On what planet was my comment you were replying to FUD? I simply pointed out a few things I'm not fond of in the language (with one point in particular stemming from my own ignorance of the language, which was corrected by folks). I was quite clear in stating that python is a language with pros and cons like any other. At which point did I claim anything to be objectively wrong with the language or spread any FUD whatsoever about using it?

Post reply on HN