Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

Post by cortesoft » Sun, Jun 23, 2024, 2:13 AM UTC

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #46

codesnik wrote: post #9

I sometimes wonder why we don't see ruby used for shell stuff more often. It inherited most of the good stuff for shell scripting from Perl, and Perl took a lot of it's syntax from sh and sed and awk, so almost anything you can do in shell script you can do in ruby, but with an option of making it gradually less terse and more readable, while having sane variables and data handling from the start. Also ruby is great…

Instability. Ruby has not been the same language for very long. Migrating to 1.9 was a huge hassle for many firms. This may seem like a long time ago in tech years; but then there was Ruby 2.0; and shell scripts, meanwhile, have stayed the same the whole time. A secondary reason is that Ruby has been very slow for much of its life, which means that for situations where you need to run a huge stack of scripts -- init…

Post by dcchambers » Sun, Jun 23, 2024, 2:14 AM UTC

mberning wrote: post #47

dcchambers wrote: post #21

I work for a company that has a large Rails monolith. Although we use many more languages than just ruby these days, we still have a ton of scripting, config, and tooling that is all in Ruby. It's a joy to work with IMO. Another common pattern I see is people using embedded ruby in a shell script. It does make it a little harder to read/understand at a glance, but it's nice for being able to do most simple things in…

I had the same experience. Somebody in our company inherited a Ruby script and was trying to modify it and was stuck. They came to me exasperated. The error message was something really trivial like addition is not defined for some object type. If you don’t understand the base level concepts of the language it’s going to be a very bad time. Sadly people are not that interested in learning about Ruby nowadays and look…

Post by greenthrow » Sun, Jun 23, 2024, 2:19 AM UTC

Post by derefr » Sun, Jun 23, 2024, 2:20 AM UTC

pansa2 wrote: post #29

derefr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This complaint comes up enough that I'm surprised nobody's created the Ruby equivalent of GraalVM, to compile a Ruby script, all its deps, and a WPOed subset of the Ruby runtime, into a native executable.

WPO?

Post by lolinder » Sun, Jun 23, 2024, 2:25 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #28

seabrookmx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think golang is used because you can easily create a single static binary, which is incredibly easy to distribute. I often find non-trivial CLI tools written in Python cumbersome because of the dependency wrangling necessary.

This complaint comes up enough that I'm surprised nobody's created the Ruby equivalent of GraalVM, to compile a Ruby script, all its deps, and a WPOed subset of the Ruby runtime, into a native executable.