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Rewriting the Ruby parser

railsatscale.com

11–20 of 182 posts

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#11

Somewhat fitting xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

While this xkcd is frequently germane, in this case it is not particularly apt. The core CRuby team, who maintain the current “standard”, are in agreement that YARP — the new “standard” — will one day replace it.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#12

I love how pragmatic the approach is here. We still don't have parser generators which generate human understandable/readable recursive descent parser with good error recovery baked in. But i am guessing the ruby syntax is too complicated/irregular anyway. On a macro side, i am always surprised with the length and effort company will go to keep working with solution design and selected at their young age, and try to…

(Disclaimer: Shopify employee but not part of this team) Ruby is my favorite language so far to write "business logic" in, and Rails is a very developer friendly web framework that makes it very easy to set up websites. So I think this is a pretty great strategy overall. The end of the day I think the way to get tech too scale, is for companies / academics / etc to really just put the work in. Java was very slow on release, but now the JVM is blazingly fast, and that is because of the huge amount of work put in by Sun, Oracle, IBM, Redhat, Google, Azul, etc. over the years.

For what its worth though, we do also have Go, Rust, Scala, etc. in different places in our stack where its needed.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#13

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

This is wholly irrelevant, but I love the spelling of O'Caml like an Irish last name. I'd definitely frequent a pub called O'Caml's.

OCaml was originally a contraction of Objective Caml, and spelled O'Caml. At some point this changed and the spelling without the apostrophe was adopted. What comes out of my fingers hasn't caught up, though.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#14

I love how pragmatic the approach is here. We still don't have parser generators which generate human understandable/readable recursive descent parser with good error recovery baked in. But i am guessing the ruby syntax is too complicated/irregular anyway. On a macro side, i am always surprised with the length and effort company will go to keep working with solution design and selected at their young age, and try to…

Where is the “more bang for the engineering buck”?

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#15

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

I mentally put Ruby / Rails and Python with Flask / Django (and also “neo” PHP) in the same category vs all of the 70 million JS frameworks. When you talk about alternatives, what are the major ones you have in mind?

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#16

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

Are you suggesting php and JS are stealing from what would've otherwise been ruby projects? I've been a ruby dev for a decade and I've never heard of a ruby shop migrating to using php for new work and maybe one or two moving to JS for new work. It's golang and elixir that are taking the place of ruby for new work in my experience. I suspect some python too, but I haven't seen that.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#17

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

I don't know why, there are tons of smaller companies using it. I have a lot of languages and experience on my resume and the one that consistently gets me the most inquiries at the highest pay grades is still Ruby.

Anecdotal I know, but from the moment that it appeared on my resume in 2012 it's been non-stop. Probably 80% of everything I hear about.

Ruby and it's ecosystem brings the closest thing to natural Aspect Oriented Programming that I've seen in the wild, which is why it's so much more productive than everything else I've tried.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#18

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times. Based on that, it seems the reports of Ruby's decline are not as bad as sometimes claimed.

If you look at PostgreSQL then a lot of dev work comes from EnterpriseDB and a handful of companies too.

The thing with Rails is that it doesn't scale terrible well to "Twitter scale" (if I'm not mistaken Twitter has dropped all usage of Rails) so there aren't that many well-known companies running it, but the overwhelming majority of companies are not "Twitter scale" and it's not really an issue for them. There's a long list of smaller outfits that are not in the "top 50" using Rails quite happily.

People focus too much on "What is {Twitter,Facebook,Google,Amazon,Netflix,...} doing?" Who cares? You're never going to have the same problems they have. And whatever they are doing is not necessarily representative for the entire industry.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#19
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times. Based on that, it seems the reports of Ruby's decline are not as bad as sometimes claimed. If you look at PostgreSQL then a lot of dev work comes from EnterpriseDB and a handful of companies too. The thing with Rails is that it doesn't scale terrible well to "Twitter scale" (if I'm not mistaken Twitter has dro…

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Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times. Based on that, it seems the reports of Ruby's decline are not as bad as sometimes claimed. If you look at PostgreSQL then a lot of dev work comes from EnterpriseDB and a handful of companies too. The thing with Rails is that it doesn't scale terrible well to "Twitter scale" (if I'm not mistaken Twitter has dro…

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