An Ode to Ruby • Hacker News Board

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#151

Post by cutler » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 3:40 AM UTC

clairity wrote: post #96

bachmeier wrote: post #10

One of my goals for 2022 is to write my first real web app. I want to understand things like authentication, creating an API, and security. My initial impression is that the JS/Node world is miserable. Rails looks 1000 times more pleasant.

ruby and rails is a much nicer, more complete, more consistent, and easier to learn ecosystem relative to js/node. and node is just the js server, so you need need a framework on top of it, like react/angular/vue/ember, to be equivalent. for most use cases, i really can't recommend the js-heavy route now that rails comes with hotwire (a transparent js framework for live/async html transfer, rather than json). for aut…

Comparing Rails/Hotwire to plain Node or Express is apples to oranges. Try Next.js or Redwood.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#152

Post by cutler » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 3:45 AM UTC

troxwalt wrote: post #44

charcircuit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Node and Rails aren't close to the same thing. I would think a better comparison would be Node - Sinatra.

Even that's a bit apples to oranges. Raw Node is very low level so comparable to Rack in Ruby.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#153

Post by cutler » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 3:50 AM UTC

jjgreen wrote: post #127

samb1729 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haikus are 5/7/5 syllables, this is 5/7/6

To-con-vey one’s mood In sev-en-teen syll-able-s Is ve-ry dif-fic John Cooper Clarke

A legend in the John Peel Hall of Fame alongside Ivor Cutler and Viv Stanshall.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#154

Post by cutler » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 3:55 AM UTC

eximius wrote: post #40

I think Ruby might be the antithesis to Java. For all that I despise Java's ridiculous boiler plate, I always know exactly what's going on. In Ruby, I feel like there are unknowns in every file. I hate Java, but Ruby makes me miss Java.

'Sounds like you need to try Kotlin.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#155

Post by cutler » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 3:57 AM UTC

weatherlite wrote: post #74

marquis_andras wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience too. I constantly fear Spring Boot magically reconfiguring itself based on what it finds in the classpath, and half the codebase being annotations and import statements. I've found the metaprogramming in Ruby much easier to understand and teach than Java's reflection and annotation processing.

I really gave Spring Boot a shot, it's just way above my head. Never felt like I had a good sense of knowing what the heck was going on what with all the Beans and annotations. But my Java was pretty poor - that could be the reason. However I never had this difficulty with Rails/Django/Node, they all felt pretty intuitive to me.

It's not your fault. Spring Boot is a trip to hell compared with Rails.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#156

Post by cutler » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 4:05 AM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #3

This reminded me of Black Perl, a poem written in Perl 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl

How I miss Perl and it's acolytes, especially The Damian and Randall Schwartz.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#157

Post by cutler » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 4:09 AM UTC

jebronie wrote: post #101

Want something easy to host? Use PHP. Want something fast and simple? Use Go. Want something really fast and powerful? Use Rust. Want something ubiquitous, with lots of developers in the labor market? Use Java. Excuse my ignorance, but what is Ruby's strength?

Developer happiness and with Rails it's Omakase.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#158

Post by cutler » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 4:12 AM UTC

sam0x17 wrote: post #102

jebronie wrote: post #101

Want something easy to host? Use PHP. Want something fast and simple? Use Go. Want something really fast and powerful? Use Rust. Want something ubiquitous, with lots of developers in the labor market? Use Java. Excuse my ignorance, but what is Ruby's strength?

Productivity. Also you can short circuit a lot of what you said with Crystal lang (for speed) or Ruby on Jets (for ease of deployment, serverless, etc). At Arist (YC S20), we were able to fully rebuild our app in Ruby on Jets, pass a pen test, get SOC 2 compliance, all in under 12 months. This frankly would have taken years if we couldn't lean on the Rails ecosystem, and our Appdex score is 0.999 typically, and we ar…

Yeah, Go's string-handling, coming from Ruby is like time travelling back to the Stone Age.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#159

Post by syspec » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #131

syspec wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to try elixir, but JetBrains still does not have an IDE for it. I'm addicted to their IDEs. I did try the community made plug-in for elixir, but had trouble getting the debugger to work which was a show stopper for me.

You probably don't want to use an ide-driven debugger for elixir, you'll want to use :dbg which has a different "conceptual model" than what you are used to and doesn't map well onto Conventional debuggers. It's simply not the same due to the extreme high degree of concurrency in the beam VM

Well, no I actually do want that in my local environment where the only request is my own.

The fact that you are telling me that I don't want something, is why people some people find the Elixir community off-putting.

Re: An Ode to Ruby

#160

Post by dnautics » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 4:47 AM UTC

syspec wrote: post #159

dnautics wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably don't want to use an ide-driven debugger for elixir, you'll want to use :dbg which has a different "conceptual model" than what you are used to and doesn't map well onto Conventional debuggers. It's simply not the same due to the extreme high degree of concurrency in the beam VM

Well, no I actually do want that in my local environment where the only request is my own. The fact that you are telling me that I don't want something, is why people some people find the Elixir community off-putting.

> the only request is my own

Literally, elixir doesn't work like that. There is a bunch of other stuff running around in the VM, even if you don't ask for it. It's like an operating system.

> is why people some people find the Elixir community off-putting

I mean ok. Note that I said "you probably". I'm just coming from a lot more experience than you have. But sure, keep giving yourself excuses to be closed minded. It really sounds like you went into the whole thing with the "let me find a reason to hate elixir" mindset, and not the "let me see what people are raving about mindset". Anyways, you're the one missing out.