An Ode to Ruby • Hacker News Board

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#21

Post by ascendantlogic » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:37 PM UTC

Rails and Django are both very pleasant and have enormous ecosystems where every imaginable problem has been encountered and "solved". It's been a while since i was writing Rails but from what I gather Rails 7 is a homerun release and has a lot of buzz around it.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#22

Post by ascendantlogic » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:38 PM UTC

My eye still twitches when I think about all the times it blew up my bundle installs.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#23

Post by AtlasBarfed » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:38 PM UTC

I am not a Python or a Ruby dev.

The Ruby devs I know are overall great devs

The Python people are second-rate.

Ruby produced tons of good software as a framework base besides Rails.

Python? Eh.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#24

Post by weatherlight » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

It's not about simplicity, It's about expressivity.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#25

Post by charcircuit » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:45 PM UTC

Having tried both Node and Rails, Rails was a horrible experience. I hated every minute of it and will ignore any job listings including it. Your whole project is in a billion files and everything works by "magic." There is so much complexity and different flies that it sucks to work with. Meanwhile with Node you can start with a simple index.js and work your way up.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#26

Post by kouteiheika » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:49 PM UTC

> Python I find equally if not more simple. Would you agree?

Simple, yes. But when I want to write a script as fast as possible with the least amount of effort I don't want simple. I want convenient and powerful. Many things which in Python take multiple lines in Ruby are simple one liners.

There's a certain dichotomy between Ruby and Python that I also see in many other pairs of languages. One language is simple, easy to learn and easy to read (Python), but is not as powerful or convenient to write. The other language is more complex, harder to learn and harder to read (Ruby), but is more powerful and convenient to write.

It seems like most people prefer the first category, which I think is why languages like Python or Go are so popular. There's nothing wrong with that as it's a tradeoff, but I personally prefer the second category, which is the reason why I do all of my scripting in Ruby and not in Python like everybody else.

Simply put I don't really mind the extra complexity since it is essentially mostly a one time cost, so I always pick whichever tool will make me more efficient in the long run. And out of the two (Python and Ruby) that's Ruby. (With a few exceptions like, e.g. machine learning, where you don't really have a choice.)

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#27

Post by ReleaseCandidat » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

Elixir with Phoenix and Liveview.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#28

Post by Mikeb85 » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

Nope. Can't stand that Python uses built-in functions for basic things like list, map, fold, etc... instead of methods on base classes. Here's a super basic example. Add one to an array [1,2,3] and print results.

Python: print(list(map(lambda x: x + 1, [1,2,3])))

Ruby: print [1,2,3].map {|x| x + 1}

So much more readable, easy to write, etc... Ruby keeps it consistent by making pretty much everything an object and you just call methods. Even Haskell has dot notation to chain functions since it's just so much easier to read and write...

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#29

Post by wfleming » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:52 PM UTC

Really depends on what you mean by "simple". "Simple" is one of those descriptors that gets tossed around a lot in programming by rarely with a clear definition.

Python is a "simpler" language with its preference for "one obvious way", and it does tend to support fewer paradigms than Ruby. Ruby is a more complex language, supporting many approaches. But if you are familiar with the various approaches, that can be "simpler" if it allows you to choose the most fitting approach for whatever problem you have at hand.

To put it another way, "simple" can mean "the language is small/has an obvious way it wants you to do things", or "simple" can mean "the language is flexible enough to be used to model your problem in the most appropriate way". Python is the first kind of simple, Ruby is the second.

IMHO Ruby is much more expressive than Python, and the stdlib is better designed and less crufty. Ruby really has one of the best stdlibs around, I think, and a lot of languages could learn a lot from it - particularly the design of `Enumerable`.

So I prefer Ruby when I have the choice. Part of that is probably just familiarity, but I've been a full time dev on both Ruby & Python projects for long stretches of time so I think I'm in a decent position to compare them. My personal preferences/taste is another aspect, of course, and there's no objective accounting for that.

The case where I often will prefer Python is if I'm scripting something that needs some degree of portability. If you pick a random Linux box it's much more likely to have some version of Python installed than Ruby, so if I'm writing something that should be easy to copy to a box and use without additional setup, I'm more likely to pick Python.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#30

Post by rahoulb » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:54 PM UTC

Personally I think writing Python is like writing maths, writing Ruby is like writing English.

Depends which one you prefer.