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

The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

mikeperham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

#11

Post by mileszs »

rmoriz wrote: post #9

It seems to me the massive "investments" made in mainly web-related frameworks (Rails, Merb, Sinatra + ORMs) didn't help the foundation of the Ruby ecosystem: Take rubygems, take RAA, take the MRI development process. If you got "brainwashed" in the last 5 years about code quality (DRY etc.) + test methods (TDD/BDD) and then look at today's Stdlib, you'll scream and want to put bleach into your eyes… To me it seems t…

The Ruby language specification (http://www.rubyspec.org/), to which all Ruby VMs are written, helps as far as the "number of Ruby interpreters around and their impact" goes. (Assuming I understood your concern correctly.) A new Ruby VM is considered legit if it passes Ruby Spec. That should help in both transparency and compatibility across implementations.

Would you agree?

Re: The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

#12

Post by rmoriz »

bobbywilson0 wrote: post #3

I am not sure the author's solution, removing the said libs, is the right direction. I agree that the stdlib is crufty and slow, but they do 'work', and people certainly use them. I think the better option might be to deprecate and replace.

To me the Stdlib API looks unfixable. So imho there's only one way:

* put the existing stdlib into a legacy gem

* create a new stdlib with a new, good, (incompatible) API from scratch

* deal with the incompatibilities that will happen

Re: The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

#13

Post by jeremymcanally »

rmoriz wrote: post #9

It seems to me the massive "investments" made in mainly web-related frameworks (Rails, Merb, Sinatra + ORMs) didn't help the foundation of the Ruby ecosystem: Take rubygems, take RAA, take the MRI development process. If you got "brainwashed" in the last 5 years about code quality (DRY etc.) + test methods (TDD/BDD) and then look at today's Stdlib, you'll scream and want to put bleach into your eyes… To me it seems t…

RAA is basically considered dead for all intents and purposes. I have rarely ever gotten anything useful from there considering it was considered "outdated" when I started Ruby some 5 years ago.

Re: The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

#14

Post by rmoriz »

mileszs wrote: post #11
rmoriz wrote: post #9

It seems to me the massive "investments" made in mainly web-related frameworks (Rails, Merb, Sinatra + ORMs) didn't help the foundation of the Ruby ecosystem: Take rubygems, take RAA, take the MRI development process. If you got "brainwashed" in the last 5 years about code quality (DRY etc.) + test methods (TDD/BDD) and then look at today's Stdlib, you'll scream and want to put bleach into your eyes… To me it seems t…

The Ruby language specification ( http://www.rubyspec.org/ ), to which all Ruby VMs are written, helps as far as the "number of Ruby interpreters around and their impact" goes. (Assuming I understood your concern correctly.) A new Ruby VM is considered legit if it passes Ruby Spec. That should help in both transparency and compatibility across implementations. Would you agree?

but you still have to implement a "language change" into all different VMs. This does cost time and money but delivers redundancy that has to be maintained. Which is great, if you don't have more important problems.

A horrible Stdlib is imho a more important problem today.

Re: The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

#16

Post by rmoriz »

jeremymcanally wrote: post #13
rmoriz wrote: post #9

It seems to me the massive "investments" made in mainly web-related frameworks (Rails, Merb, Sinatra + ORMs) didn't help the foundation of the Ruby ecosystem: Take rubygems, take RAA, take the MRI development process. If you got "brainwashed" in the last 5 years about code quality (DRY etc.) + test methods (TDD/BDD) and then look at today's Stdlib, you'll scream and want to put bleach into your eyes… To me it seems t…

RAA is basically considered dead for all intents and purposes. I have rarely ever gotten anything useful from there considering it was considered "outdated" when I started Ruby some 5 years ago.

yes, considered dead but still having a few updates a month. A zombie project that needs to be ended "officially".

Re: The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

#17

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

rmoriz wrote: post #9

It seems to me the massive "investments" made in mainly web-related frameworks (Rails, Merb, Sinatra + ORMs) didn't help the foundation of the Ruby ecosystem: Take rubygems, take RAA, take the MRI development process. If you got "brainwashed" in the last 5 years about code quality (DRY etc.) + test methods (TDD/BDD) and then look at today's Stdlib, you'll scream and want to put bleach into your eyes… To me it seems t…

Rubygems has gotten a few improvements from the popularity of Rails. Github gem hosting may have been a stepping stone, but it did help. Bundler and gemcutter are definitely an improvement.

Re: The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

#19

Post by rmoriz »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #17
rmoriz wrote: post #9

It seems to me the massive "investments" made in mainly web-related frameworks (Rails, Merb, Sinatra + ORMs) didn't help the foundation of the Ruby ecosystem: Take rubygems, take RAA, take the MRI development process. If you got "brainwashed" in the last 5 years about code quality (DRY etc.) + test methods (TDD/BDD) and then look at today's Stdlib, you'll scream and want to put bleach into your eyes… To me it seems t…

Rubygems has gotten a few improvements from the popularity of Rails. Github gem hosting may have been a stepping stone, but it did help. Bundler and gemcutter are definitely an improvement.

rubygems still lacks a mirroring and is heavly amazon AWS dependent.

see the slides of my recent talk about it:

http://www.slideshare.net/rmoriz/rubygems-behind-the-gems

Re: The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto

#20

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

chanks wrote: post #5
rmoriz wrote: post #4

Database Error :(

Copy: Much of Ruby’s standard library (the set of classes shipped with the Ruby VM itself) is old and crufty. For laughs, go look at the code for some of the classes that you’ve never used. Chances are it’s from 2000-2003 and doesn’t even look like idiomatic Ruby. I’m wondering what classes should be removed from the standard library or deprecated so that higher quality replacements can take their place. The canonica…

Drb is a bit unusual and rarely used, but I wonder what his objection is to the API?
Post reply on HN