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RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI

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Re: RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI

#42
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found the Ruby community really cares about DUX. Not sure why it’s not in other language communities

Matz said he designed Ruby to optimize for developer happiness, it’s just a core principle of the language since it was created

Happiness of a developer writing code can be a misery of a one having to read / debug it. I worked in ruby for a couple years around 2009 and having to deal with a code that implemented most of its logic via method missing is still one of the strongest negative memories I have about coding.

Re: RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI

#44
post #38
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is position #10 in https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages bad? It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.

Compare that to Rust. For all the hype it has, very few companies are shipping products with it. There are a few, but nowhere near as many as are using Ruby.

That's probably true, but also a poor measure of success. I bet there are more companies using Ruby than there are companies using C++, too. They fill different niches, and different types of companies deliver very different products using those languages.

The ratio of people who can code in Python or Ruby to people who can code in Rust or C++ is very high.

Re: RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI

#45
post #38
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is position #10 in https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages bad? It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.

Compare that to Rust. For all the hype it has, very few companies are shipping products with it. There are a few, but nowhere near as many as are using Ruby.

I get your point but it's a case of right tool for the job. Every copy of Ruby now includes YJIT written in Rust because Rust is the right tool for that task.

It's easy to forget though that number of lines of code required to do something is also a valid metric and Ruby beats Rust on that.

So if you're shipping CRUD web apps that might be a more important metric than say memory usage or CPU time.

Different job, different tool. More people want to ship web apps than write their own JITs.

Engineering is the art of trade offs.

Re: RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI

#46

Saw this gem of a gem on reddit earlier today and there were some trollish comments about no one using ruby anymore blah blah blah which quietly bummed me out. Surprised and Delighted to see it as #1 here on HN tonight!

> some trollish comments about no one using ruby anymore It is somewhat objectively true: https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/GitHub-Octove... It doesn't mean much, and this library can be reproduced in any of those top 10 languages from what I can tell.

Ruby will always have a special place in my heart. I cut my teeth as a young programmer on that language, and I learnt its value (as well as the value of using something else) along the way.

Ruby code can be downright poetic, for better or worse. There's a certain kind of magic to the kind of code it enables. That's not always good, but it _is_ beautiful.

I encourage everybody to read the venerable "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" [1] to see what I'm talking about.

I wish Ruby was cross-platform. It still only works on Windows using the MSYS2 emulation layer, and the only reason as far as I can tell is that it committed hard and early to `fork()` as the main way to use multiple cores.

[1]: https://poignant.guide/

Re: RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI

#47

Why does this say it was posted four hours ago on the front page, four days ago on Agolia, 3 days ago on /from and the comments are all from minutes to hours ago here?

at least 2 ways.

1. Moderators can re-submit interesting stories from a second chance pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool (This might happen automatically from time to time?) When this happens some of the timestamps get updated but others dont.

2. Moderators can invite users via email to re-submit stories. https://news.ycombinator.com/invited

Re: RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI

#48
post #38
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is position #10 in https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages bad? It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.

Compare that to Rust. For all the hype it has, very few companies are shipping products with it. There are a few, but nowhere near as many as are using Ruby.

You are probably writing this in a browser with Rust code in it.

Re: RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI

#49
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare that to Rust. For all the hype it has, very few companies are shipping products with it. There are a few, but nowhere near as many as are using Ruby.

That's probably true, but also a poor measure of success. I bet there are more companies using Ruby than there are companies using C++, too. They fill different niches, and different types of companies deliver very different products using those languages. The ratio of people who can code in Python or Ruby to people who can code in Rust or C++ is very high.

I don’t know why “number of companies using language X” is a metric that is used here. Wordpress is serving 43% of websites on the internet as of 2025, so we should all be learning PHP!
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