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Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

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Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#171

Post by jeremycarter »

Scarbutt wrote: post #26
navaneethpk wrote: post #24

We recently migrated ToolJet ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408)'s server from Ruby ( Rails ) to TypeScript ( Nest.js ). Our goal was to have only one language in our stack so that it will be easy for the open-source contributors. I have been working as a Ruby dev since 2015 and I really love Ruby. Initially I thought we might miss a lot of things when we switch to TS. But it turned out to be a great dec…

Honestly typeorm and nestjs are pretty bad.

With all its warts NestJS is still a great choice if you want everything to be well structured with a touch of "enterprise grade" - whatever that means. Compliment it with an Angular front end and you've got a frontend and backend with very similar structure.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#172

Post by helloguillecl »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #4

This is really cool. I’ve used a number of languages and dabbled in a few frameworks but nothing I’ve used brings me joy like ruby does. I approach programming creatively. I think in large systems and architecture. Ruby allows me to skip worrying about the details. Code blocks abstract away thinking about loops and just focus on data. Just about every array operation I could want is there, waiting for a code block. I…

I got sucked into React, graphQL and Nodejs and and always missed Rails, with all the hype I never thought that the environment would be so far behind. It's all my fault.

But now that Rails has incorporated Stimulus as a sane approach to the client-side of things, I'm coming back and it will be difficult to take me away again.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#173

Post by DeathArrow »

eldavido wrote: post #70
HeyImAlex wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that they’re fashionable, it’s that their ergonomics have improved significantly over the past decade. I saw dynamic types as a response to cumbersome static type systems, but increasingly type systems are becoming more expressive and less cumbersome.

Yeah, this is how I see it, too. Sort of a gradual convergence. On the static side, Java and especially C# are simply _better_ than they used to be. Type inference is great - I can just write var x = new List () rather than having to stupidly repeat the type e.g. List x = new List (). Add in generics, and lambdas, and about a dozen other things that have now become widespread, and it's really a different game than 10…

Not only C# and Java, but C++ has auto, Typescript has let, Rust has let and I think many other languages have type inference.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#174

Post by DeathArrow »

fastball wrote: post #64
tambourine_man wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that's a pretty out-of-date take Gradual/optional static typing are not new ideias. It’s just that they are fashionable now. It used to be that not having to deal with types at all was the cool place to be in. Our computers were getting so much faster every year, why would performance be a concern? Programmers are more productive in dynamic languages and computer time is cheap, etc, etc. The “correctness” pitch…

When it comes to code, I'm fairly certain "correctness" is in fact an irrefutable advantage. The argument has always been whether or not the price of that correctness is too high. But at this point if you're using a modern IDE / code editor (e.g. VSCode), it's actually easier to write statically typed code because the inference / auto-completion / etc is so much better when you do. At least with TypeScript in VSCode.

With Visual Studio also. Intellisense works wonders.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#175

Post by DeathArrow »

tambourine_man wrote: post #43
eropple wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a set of statements that strike me as pretty unreflective of the state of things these days. I have slung a lot of Ruby in my life and I literally-not-figuratively stopped the second I laid my hands on TypeScript because we've hit the point where gradual static typing is both easily available and super easy to work with . (And there's also Rust, which can scratch a whole different set of itches that I don't h…

> But that's a pretty out-of-date take Gradual/optional static typing are not new ideias. It’s just that they are fashionable now. It used to be that not having to deal with types at all was the cool place to be in. Our computers were getting so much faster every year, why would performance be a concern? Programmers are more productive in dynamic languages and computer time is cheap, etc, etc. The “correctness” pitch…

You might not care about types but the computer you are running your code on, cares very much.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#176

Post by nitrogen »

Lio wrote: post #159
grncdr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you already know it, but I find `something.method(:mystery_method).source_location` points me to the right place more often than not. I only mention it because I have noticed a lot of people work productively in Ruby without leveraging it's dynamic/reflective features[0], but little idioms like the above are absolute lifesavers for me. [0]: A big disadvantage of the above is it's not statically resolvable, so y…

The two tools I'd recommend for navigating ruby code in addition to #source_location are Solargraph[1] and, my favourite, good 'ol exuberant ctags[2]. Solargraph is an amazing project but ctags is still just so fast and low overhead that it's what I mostly use. ctag support is available for most editors and is built into Vim. You need to first generate a tag file (or have an editor plugin do it for you[3]) and then p…

And don't forget the option of just calling into pry at the line in question and typing ls and show-doc. Also ripgrep is incredibly useful for navigating new codebases.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#178

Post by nitrogen »

rhizome31 wrote: post #157
devoutsalsa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“git grep” is pretty amazing for tracking things down.

Of course that's what we end up doing in practice, using external tools (CLI or IDE) to work around a limitation in expressiveness of the language. This advice is a testimony that there's indeed a problem upfront :) And it comes short when searching from commonly used names...

This advice is a testimony that there's indeed a problem upfront

Indeed, and the problem is that IDEs have encouraged developers to write convoluted code and to forget how to navigate a filesystem. Reading code and commit history is a much faster path to understanding a system than an IDE's autocomplete. I learned this from Ruby, and it serves me well in C, Kotlin, Scala, PL/SQL, Typescript, etc.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#179

Post by jack_riminton »

chrischattin wrote: post #169
valenterry wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is actually a very efficient way of programming. but it doesn't scale in project size and team size. Similar for Lisp. This is why these languages are really good for prototyping, but not as good anymore for big, longterm projects imho. That's also why I don't think it's a great idea to add types etc. to programming languages like python or ruby. They are not made for this and they should focus on what t…

This is just not true. There are several multi-Billion dollar public companies with millions of users and thousands of employees built on Rails. In fact, the philosophy of convention over configuration et all makes Rails MORE scalable and easier to onboard new people than anything else out there that I’ve seen.

I agree, the convention means there are very straight-forwarded places to look for things

I recently worked on a Rails project for someone who didn't like to create scaffolds, models or controllers for small things, thinking that it would add to the bloat. But conceptually it makes everything 10x times easier and faster to find and understand

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#180

Post by DeathArrow »

friedman23 wrote: post #41
Mikeb85 wrote: post #8

Honestly I don't get why some people want to move to static types. Ruby is a dynamic language, that's the point of it... Giant orgs can just use Java or something. We need some languages to stay productive for those of us who work solo or in small groups. If I wanted static types I'd use Java, Go or something (probably Haskell).

> Honestly I don't get why some people want to move to static types I don't understand how anyone that has experience with dynamically typed languages and the insane runtime errors that can result from them would ever consider using a dynamically typed language. It's terrible and it actually provides little to no benefit in development speed. People always say development is faster in a dynamically typed language, th…

>Given the popularity of typescript and how nearly all major internet companies have moved to typed versions of their dynamically typed languages it's clear to me the whole dynamic typing experiment has failed absolutely miserably.

Python is one of the most popular programming languages.

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