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Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

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Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#331

Post by joelbluminator »

eropple wrote: post #307
joelbluminator wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of date how?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 correct…

YOU are faster with Typescript. Can you accept the fact that certain people are not and do not like Typescript? You live in a Typescript bubble so you conclude everyone is doing that. Just open a jobs board and see for yourself not everyone is doing Typescript.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#332

Post by ngc248 »

sparker72678 wrote: post #259
ngc248 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic languages start becoming problematic as more the size of the codebase increases. It becomes very hard to maintain.

Use whatever language you want; there is no large codebase that's easy to maintain.

I agree, but maintaining a large codebase in a statically typed language as compared to a dynamic language is magnitudes easier.

As the codebase grows larger, if people dont have the discipline to write proper code, the code will get more and more complicated since you will not know what exactly you will get. Mostly dynamic languages are easy to get into (which is a strength) but this becomes a weakness as the project becomes larger.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#333

Post by tonyedgecombe »

stickfigure wrote: post #330
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ IDEs lagged Java IDEs on this stuff.

C++ IDEs predate the existence of Java, let alone Java IDEs. Microsoft Visual C++ was excellent for the time, and did most of what you expect a modern IDE to do. In 1993.

Visual C++ didn't get Intellisense until 1997 and even then it was poor. C++ has never caught up with the tooling that Java and .Net developers have.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#334

Post by dnautics »

joelbluminator wrote: post #329
dnautics wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you aren't working in startups. I'm at literally my third company that uses divvy as their corporate card. You probably haven't heard of klarna, or discord, either.

It's very weird to assume I'm some dinosaur because I haven't heard of a company that doesn't even have a Wikipedia page and hasn't IPO'ed yet. We use Recurly to do subscriptions and our expenses aren't done in the U.S (maybe that's the thing?). About Discord see my other comment - I don't think Elixir is their main language.

https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...

> From day one, Discord has used Elixir as the backbone of its chat infrastructure.

https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/what-i...

> Another is a re-architecture of our guilds service, which as our biggest communities have grown, started struggling to handle 100,000 connected sessions per Elixir process. We horizontally scaled the Elixir processes so that we can scale as the number of connected sessions increases... Many of our stateful services that maintain connections to clients, and process and distribute messages in real-time, are written in Elixir, which is well suited to the real-time message passing workload. But in recent years we have run up against some scaling limitations. Discord has written and open-sourced several libraries that ease some pains we’ve encountered with managing a large, distributed Elixir system with hundreds of servers

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#335

Post by joelbluminator »

wavesplash wrote: post #207
oblio wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you'd better not check what happened to all those Rails apps when those companies grew. There are soooo many blogs about migrating away from Ruby, adopting Go, Scala, whatever statically typed thing. There's a reason even Ruby is getting a proper static type system.

Um, really? Why are unicorns like Shopify or Github are still using Rails if that's the norm?

Shopify is not a unicorn...sorry for nitpicking. Its a publicly traded company worth 210 billion dollars. It used to be a unicorn a long time ago.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#336

Post by joelbluminator »

horsawlarway wrote: post #265
llamataboot wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explicit programming is more readable, but can result in a lot of boilerplate. "Magical" programming is much more intuitive once you know where the magic comes from but can be maddening to debug. Any framework large enough to be useful starts abstracting away implementation details. I've found that people that gravitate towards Ruby enjoy meta-programming. The running joke is that you're not a Ruby programmer until y…

Magic requires memorization. Memorization is not consistent between teams/team-members. Memorization is also the fastest skillset folks lose if they step away from the language/toolset for a while (it degrades rapidly) Worst of all - The RoR ecosystem (6 versions in) requires memorization about which set of things you need to have memorized for this specific version of the framework. I'll take some boilerplate code E…

What framework are you using then? Rails is pretty intuitive and easy...I am biased yes but nothing I saw from Spring or Django made me think they made more sense than Rails. The whole Bean thing is pretty crazy. Django is an over engineerd Rails from what I saw.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#337

Post by joelbluminator »

pmarreck wrote: post #280
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’ve tried purely function languages and I just can’t wrap my head around them because they abstract too much. Not sure what you mean here specifically (do you not understand Enumerable.inject in the Ruby stdlib? That's about the hardest thing to understand and once you're there, functional langs are pretty trivial) I was already coding in a functional style in Ruby (PORO, intentionally not mutating vars, etc.), so…

Or...you are working on way smaller Elixir projects. Lets see how fun it is to inherit a million line old Elixir project 7 years from now. Or a million line codebase split into 50 services. I am sure you'll be productive as hell cos Elixir!

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#338

Post by joelbluminator »

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…

> a LOT of them are trying to get out and work with something else (several folks I know are moving to elixir)

Dumb move, Elixir has around 1000 job openings in the U.S while Ruby has 35000. In fact I find it pretty hard to believe they can't get a Ruby job in the U.S, and they choose Elixir from all stacks as a solution to their problem. Sounds to me like they just wanna try Elixir and can't really build a good argument in their head on why they're doing it. Jobs-wise things are definitely not gonna be easier for them with Elixir.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#339

Post by shafyy »

chowchowchow wrote: post #246
shafyy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel very similarly with Ruby and especially Rails. After working in Rails for multiple years, I'm now doing a freelance gig where the tech stack is React, NodeJS with TypeScript on Firebase Cloud Functions, and it almost sucks out all of the joy of programming. Making software in Rails feels creative, and the act of writing code in itself is very satisfactory. A good opportunity to re-read the Rails Doctrine: http…

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…

> I think there’s a clear point in project size where the joy of writing code has to be deprioritized behind maintainability and simplicity, even if it becomes less fun to write code that way.

I completely disagree. Joy of writing code must always be a top priority, also in large codebases. There are enough examples of where Ruby (on Rails) is used in large codebases with GitHub, Shopify, etc.

I guess it's a matter of personal match, too. Some people match better with TypeScript, others better with Rails. Nothing wrong about that.

I'm aware that they use a heavily modified version of Rails, but it still is Rails in the fundament.

Re: Where is Ruby Headed in 2021?

#340

Post by chespinoza »

ksec wrote: post #311
MrWiffles wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't comment on the Elixir stuff since I haven't really touched it at all yet (only ever seen one job opening in hundreds over 5+ years mentioning Elixir - only one, total!). But I have a theory on the rest... I think the actual reason why it's not more popular is something I personally call "The Tyranny of the Masses". In short, what's popular/flavor-of-the-month is automatically "right", and everything else is a…

It isn't complicated. Crystal doesn't work on Windows. If elixir ecosystem is small, Crystal is 10 times smaller. Unless there is an active community that decide to do the grind and fill in all the missing pieces. Crystal may remain a niche in the foreseeable future.

Well, you can run Linux using WSL in Linux so you can get Crystal working there anyways.
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