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

Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

bignerdranch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 360 posts

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#301

Post by handrous »

joelbluminator wrote: post #294
handrous wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is the more recent one. Folks who worked in PHP but got out at the right time look at all the low-paying PHP jobs (and there are lots of them!) and see mostly-PHP-experience job candidates dismissed out of hand for higher-paying jobs that would offer work experience outside PHP and think "there but for the grace of God, go I".

PHP has declined but its by no means a dead or dying tech. Pay should be good in the good companies (Slack? MessageBird? I am sure there are some big names I dont follow the PHP world that much). What I am saying is that even declining tech can provide stable income for decades. Perl is a different story though. I dont know if the Perl people can still get jobs writing Perl.

Oh no, it's not dying—there's a ton of PHP work out there—it's just that most of the PHP dev market is very stagnant, wage-wise, outside a handful of companies, in a way that most languages in wide use are not. There's also a real stigma that goes along with still being mostly a PHP person these days, I've noticed. (I was one, like... 9 or 10 years ago)

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#302

Post by devoutsalsa »

oblio wrote: post #266
hagbard_c wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, not really. It is more of the equivalent of showing how to read (or where to find) maps instead of pointing out something on one. If the searcher is in a hurry the latter is more helpful, otherwise the former is preferable.

Yeah, but you shouldn't need git grep to find out what something is. I understand using to find out why it's there, but not what it is.

Personally I find it faster than using an IDE much of the time. It’s super fast and very powerful.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#303

Post by sanderjd »

nitrogen wrote: post #176
Lio wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, grep + debugger / pry were how I solved this when I was still writing lots of Ruby. I find it much more productive to be able to get these answers statically, but I was too strong when I said "impossible"; there's always some way to find the right code, or the VM wouldn't be able to run it :)

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#304

Post by sanderjd »

chenmike wrote: post #139
sanderjd wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The often impossibility of finding the definition of the methods I'm calling is the main thing that soured me on Rails. I think a more explicit style is more common nowadays, which is a good thing.

This magic is delightful in small codebases I’m familiar with and absolute hell in large codebases I’m not familiar with

Well put. Totally my view of it.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#305

Post by sanderjd »

MrWiffles wrote: post #222
sanderjd wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The often impossibility of finding the definition of the methods I'm calling is the main thing that soured me on Rails. I think a more explicit style is more common nowadays, which is a good thing.

Yeah that's been a major pain in my ass more than once, totally get where you're coming from there. One tip for you, and anyone else who might be reading this from the future (hi! do we have flying cars yet? what about time machines? can you bring me one of each, in like, 10 minutes?): RubyMine, the IDE from JetBrains (commercial, Java-based desktop app but not nearly as bad/sluggish as you might expect, though not n…

If that RubyMine feature works well these days then that's great! In my day it was nice but hit or miss.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#306

Post by phendrenad2 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #175
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…

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

That's true, however I think you're misunderstanding how languages work. The Ruby interpreter knows the "type" of everything. How could it not? It was there when you defined a variable, and it was there when you added data to it. It's there when you define interfaces and other things that might affect the type of something. It's perfectly capable of holding all of that information. And there's no meaningful difference between parsing "int x = 3;" and "var x = 3;" in a program.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#307

Post by eropple »

joelbluminator wrote: post #106
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…

Out of date how? Tons of people write pure javascript and not typescript. They are all not as productive as you?

I'm saying that I am significantly faster and more correct TypeScript than JavaScript, and I know literally no people who are starting greenfield projects in JavaScript today.

People choosing to write JavaScript in 2021 might be plenty productive. I trust their code much less, though, unless they're writing a battery of tests to establish sanity at their module boundaries and making the extra effort to ensure correctness that you get very cheaply with TypeScript.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#308

Post by joelbluminator »

pmarreck wrote: post #277
joelbluminator wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you happy with the way things are going for Elixir? It seemed to me like the Elixir community was hoping for it to become the next Ruby and I don't see that happening anymore. It will have to settle for being a well respected but obscure piece of tech, kinda like what Erlang is.

Discord, an app with 300 million users, is apparently built on an "obscure piece of tech" >.. maybe come out from under that ruby rock and smell the dev air now and then Also, I was on Ruby since the time when it was "trying to be the next Java" (this was prior to 1.0!). All good things start out small. Anyway, after the initial learning curve, much happier working in Elixir/Phoenix than I ever was in Ruby/Rails... e…

1. I don't know Discord that well but looking at their Github it lists Javascript, Python, Rust, C++ and Elixir (in that order). Is Elixir their main language? Their careers page has tech all over the place - Rust, Java, Python, I actually am not bumping into Elixir. Could be a coincidence but it reinforces my feeling that Elixir is not the main language on Discord (if they even have one).

2. The amount of users Discord has has nothing much to do with anything. Facebook has 2 billion users and its programming language is Hack. So Hack isn't obscure? How many people know and use Hack besides a few thousand Facebook employees? If Facebook gets 2 more billion users in the next decade will Hack become 2x as popular?

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#309

Post by ksec »

horsawlarway wrote: post #264
chowchowchow wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this exact realization getting ramped up in a large rails codebase: ruby is optimized for experience of the code author, while most of the things people miss from it (explicit imports, static types) help with code maintenance and codebase scalability. The small/large project distinction makes sense to me. I think there’s a clear point in project size where the joy of writing code has to be deprioritized behind…

It's not a pleasant experience to come on board and deal with a typeless, styleless, inconsistent mess. And that's what Ruby on Rails will create, unless you spend an inordinate amount of effort on adding back all the tooling you need to make functional software in large groups. Even then - there's no real path to a mature and maintainable language/framework. In my area (Atlanta) we're seeing a glut of RoR devs avail…

>Even then - there's no real path to a mature and maintainable language/framework.

Hopefully that is what Github and Shopify brings to the table. Instead of just using Rails they are now actively shaping its future direction.

>because a lot of the large employers have given up and shut down the RoRs projects

My impression is that the vast majority of Rails communities don't care much about its ecosystem growth. They are just happily using it.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#310

Post by ksec »

oblio wrote: post #275
aantix wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RoR is the most popular choice with Y-Combinator companies. Its productivity is simply hard to beat. Most of these companies are unicorns or public. https://spreecommerce.org/ruby-on-rails-most-popular-among-t...

Dropbox literally hired Guido for a while and sponsored a performance oriented fork of Python. I doubt they can be listed as a Rails success story.

I dont think Dropbox even use Ruby. They have been a Python shop since day one?

Stripe doesn't use Rails either. That was a pretty bad article. And it is somehow from Spree.

Post reply on HN