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Ruby Together

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Re: Ruby Together

#71
post #65
post #36

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I think a major holdback for Ruby, is how tightly it is coupled to Rails. Comments like this show how the community, unconscious, ties them together too. I think for Ruby to truly thrive again, it must become more than 'the language rails was once written in'. I'm a Ruby developer. I don't particularly like Rails (but don't hate or avoid it either) and I'm more and more convinced that Rails is doing Ruby more harm th…

On the contrary, I think Rails continues to sustain the Ruby ecosystem. It's not like there aren't alternatives such as Sinatra and Grape for microservices. There are also plenty of non-Rails Ruby jobs. If you search for `ruby -rails` on Indeed.co.uk there are 1879 results so 1503 when you factor-out 10% for unrelated results.

The alternatives are certainly there. I'm using Sinatra almost exclusively when I'm not running on Rack directly.

There are really neat complete frameworks like hanami, padrino and grape (not sure how active they are, though) too.

My point was not that "its impossible" just that compared to other languages, the Rails framework is an Elephant In The Room.

Python is much larger than Pytorch, Pandas, Django or whatnot. Typescript was built for React mostly, but outgrew that rapidly. Javascript is no longer focused around on framework (like it was in jQuery times, if you consider jQuery a framework). Java-for-web often boils down to Spring, but Java is much, much more versatile than that.

With Ruby? There's chef, puppet, some sinatra, capistrano and then there is ... RAILS!

Re: Ruby Together

#72

I'm a a typescript/java engineer. I would say my lifetime code stats are probably around 40% JS / 35% Typescript / 15% Java / 8% Python / 2% other. That is to say, I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language. I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so…

> I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language.

I'm in a similar boat, with the caveat that on linux, I use ruby as my main scripting language rather than bash, mostly because I find bash to to be a terrible language for anything remotely complex. Ruby has great integration for running shell commands, while also allowing you to write your scripts as an actual program, which is great.

For me, the language I have written almost nothing in, while it is secretly my favorite, is Elixir/Erlang.

Re: Ruby Together

#73
post #10
post #3

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What would convince you? * top companies using it? (shopify, github, stripe) * number of stars on github for projects? https://github.com/rails/rails has 50k stars * place in the Redmonk language rankings? https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-2... shows it at #9 * ability to get a good paying job? https://marketing.dice.com/pdf/2020/Dice_2020_Tech_Salary_Re... has the ruby salary at 114k, more t…

What you say means it's worth learning if you can land in the right company which is quite risky. Besides, unless a language has a strong point compared to others, it's a hard sell, like PHP is good on web, JS is known by everyone and ecosystem is huge and python is good for ML and scientific stuff but what's the selling point of ruby besides rails? With that said I do like the language itself (but not the typing sys…

> what's the selling point of ruby besides rails?

In devops, at least, Puppet extensions and facts can be written in ruby.

I much prefer ruby as a scripting language, as well.

Re: Ruby Together

#74

I'm a a typescript/java engineer. I would say my lifetime code stats are probably around 40% JS / 35% Typescript / 15% Java / 8% Python / 2% other. That is to say, I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language. I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so…

I'll be honest, I'm worried too. I'm a fullstack dev, but I consider myself a decent rubyist. I've been writing it for about 10 years and have spoken at rubyconf a few times. All else being equal, I just like the language itself. The points others make here are true, there are a ton of ruby shops, and demand for someone with a couple years of rails experience is still quite high. But the issue is not where ruby is no…

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Re: Ruby Together

#75
post #12
post #10

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What you say means it's worth learning if you can land in the right company which is quite risky. Besides, unless a language has a strong point compared to others, it's a hard sell, like PHP is good on web, JS is known by everyone and ecosystem is huge and python is good for ML and scientific stuff but what's the selling point of ruby besides rails? With that said I do like the language itself (but not the typing sys…

> what's the selling point of ruby? I'd say it is custom webapp development (with rails) and scripting on the command line (anything bash can do, ruby can do better). PHP is good on the web with the huge installed base of wordpress, but when it comes to custom web app development, ruby (well, rails, really) holds its own with laravel, symfony and the other MVC frameworks.

> scripting on the command line (anything bash can do, ruby can do better)

completely agreed. on a linux system, most of my shell scripts are written in ruby at this point, simply because it is much better to work with than bash.

Re: Ruby Together

#76

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It didn't come across as combative at all, no worries. I find it pretty convincing to be honest. If anything I think the biggest hold-up is that I can get jobs as a senior front-end engineer but if I looked for Ruby jobs I'd kind of be taking 2 steps back down in terms of what I can contribute. Frankly I'm not a fast learner, unfortunately. Although it's possible that I've convinced myself of that because I hate the…

We're hiring for Ruby/Rails. We're also hiring JS. I've used Ruby/Rails my entire career and don't plan on switching. Pay seems good. Definitely more JS jobs of course but I'm happy with what I'm doing and making. I bet you can pick it up in no time.

Would you consider sharing which company you’re speaking of (“we are hiring for Ruby/Rails”)

My email is in my profile.

Re: Ruby Together

#77
post #51

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What makes Ruby a fantastic language is that Ruby code can be structurally beautiful and poetic. It just flows well.

To accomplish...?

Adapting to how I naturally think and thus reducing the annoying friction and boilerplate present in so many other languages.

Feels soft, malleable, agreeable, and defines the minute-by-minute experience of using it.

Puts me in a state of flow and contributes to me looking forward to coding sessions.

Re: Ruby Together

#78
post #51

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To accomplish...?

Better readability for fellow humans. I think these 2 quotes by matz describe best ruby's philosophy. > I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language > Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run fast. By doing this, the machine will…

> I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language

That's why I wish ruby to succeed but after 20+ years of the language being around and python is taking all the scripting needs outside of web, I'm not sure what area is left for ruby.

Re: Ruby Together

#79

I'm a a typescript/java engineer. I would say my lifetime code stats are probably around 40% JS / 35% Typescript / 15% Java / 8% Python / 2% other. That is to say, I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language. I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so…

10-year Rails dev here, there's still plenty of work to be found if you want it. (Full disclosure- I am currently not employed and working on a project not involving SWE.)

Come on in the water's fine.

Re: Ruby Together

#80
post #37

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I'll be honest, I'm worried too. I'm a fullstack dev, but I consider myself a decent rubyist. I've been writing it for about 10 years and have spoken at rubyconf a few times. All else being equal, I just like the language itself. The points others make here are true, there are a ton of ruby shops, and demand for someone with a couple years of rails experience is still quite high. But the issue is not where ruby is no…

You haven’t really said why you think people will suddenly stop founding companies with Ruby on Rails. People have been saying Ruby on Rails will go no where since it launched. So far their 5 year predictions have always been wrong. Personally, I think startups are exciting. I think Rails will still be a favourite with startups in 5 years time because it lets you build MVPs fast. It gives you sensible defaults for th…

The problem for Ruby & Rails long term is that it's lost the battle in a lot of different areas. Education will use Python or Javascript if they want an interpreted & loosely typed languages. Numpy dominates the scientific/computational space if you don't want to use Matlab/R/Julia/etc. pyTorch is the way into Machine Learning.

Ruby is starting at a knowledge/awareness deficit and long term it's going to be hard to keep a quality edge to make up for that.

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