Why did NodeJS take off on the backend while Rails was still popular? I'll never understand it.
Google hired all the best JIT engineers and set them to work on v8. If you want better performance you'd have to choose an AOT compiled language.
Ruby 3.4.0
31–40 of 282 posts
Re: Ruby 3.4.0
#32[flagged]
Do you have any evidence that it's been used less and less?
Re: Ruby 3.4.0
#33What does ruby do well that other languages don't? What is the niche it's trying to fill?
You'll need to learn it if you want to use Rails.
Re: Ruby 3.4.0
#34[flagged]
Do you have any evidence that it's been used less and less?
Re: Ruby 3.4.0
#35I am liking all the performance improvement goodies on JIT and GC level.
Re: Ruby 3.4.0
#36What does ruby do well that other languages don't? What is the niche it's trying to fill?
Ruby has the nicest object-oriented design (everything is an object) outside of smalltalk (IMHO).
In contrast to the mess that is Python. For instance, in Ruby it is natural that each or map are methods of Array or Hash rather than global functions which receive an Array or Hash argument.
This goes as far as having the not operator '!' as a method on booleans:
false.! == true
Once you have understood it, it is a very beautiful language.
Re: Ruby 3.4.0
#37Why did NodeJS take off on the backend while Rails was still popular? I'll never understand it.
Because of the JavaScript Everywhere crowd. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a problem for JavaScript.
To be fair, js interpreters are available out of the box in all digital devices out there that embed a browser. That's a huge deal, as far as portability is concerned.
That said you do have things like https://opalrb.com/
Re: Ruby 3.4.0
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the language with the highest ratio of (useful work / LOC), so it's the least verbose language. This makes it very suitable to write and understand complex scripts, because the reduced boilerplate means less cognitive overhead for the programmer. As a result, experienced programmers can be extremely productive with it. The well-known Rails framework uses this to great effect, however, some people argue that the…
Experienced teams love magic?
Experienced teams know to be careful and sparing with its use.
Re: Ruby 3.4.0
#39Shopify strategy aka the story of YJIT If I cannot refactor my services, I shall refactor Ruby instead.
That has been the story of every dynamic language since forever, thankfully the whole AI focus has made JITs finally matter in CPython world as well.
Personally I have learnt this lesson back in 2000's, in the age of AOLServer, Vignette, and our own Safelayer product. All based on Apache, IIS and Tcl.
We were early adopters of .NET, when it was only available to MSFT Partners and never again, using scripting languages without compilers, for full blown applications.
Those learnings are the foundations of OutSystems, same ideas, built with a powerful runtime, with the hindsight of our experiences.