Ruby for Good • Hacker News Board

Re: Ruby for Good

#11

Post by graboid » Sun, May 24, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

block_dagger wrote: post #3

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

I feel for a smallish project I'd rather prefer to have more readable, dense code like Ruby's over the ceremony of static types.

Re: Ruby for Good

#12

Post by hoten » Sun, May 24, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

m12k wrote: post #10

block_dagger wrote: post #3

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

The typescript team themselves rewrote the compiler in Go to get better use of coding agents.

They started that migration years ago. I don't remember them citing agentic coding as a reason. Do you have a source?

Re: Ruby for Good

#13

Post by jazzyjackson » Sun, May 24, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

block_dagger wrote: post #3

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

I’m downvoting because this is basically bait without any contribution as to why you feel that way, but personally I vibe coded a very successful result by iterating a rails app and then crawling the entire site into static files (~144,000 product pages and category pages) and then stashing them all in a bucket on cloudflare free tier.

I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.

Re: Ruby for Good

#14

Post by compumike » Sun, May 24, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

block_dagger wrote: post #3

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

You can cheaply and readably give a lot of clues to both agents and humans with some assertions at the start of a method:

  raise ArgumentError.new("...") unless ...

which can include type assertions but also a lot more. The agents seem to do well with this.

I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.

Re: Ruby for Good

#15

Post by franz899 » Sun, May 24, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

m12k wrote: post #10

block_dagger wrote: post #3

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

The typescript team themselves rewrote the compiler in Go to get better use of coding agents.

They did it for speed, and Go was the language with the closest syntax to migrate to.

Re: Ruby for Good

#16

Post by rdevilla » Sun, May 24, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

The only programming language I know of that is obsessed with trumpeting its own moral virtue. "Matz is nice so we are nice," "Ruby for good," dragging DHH, etc.

Meanwhile the Ruby Central and whytheluckystiff debacles show it to be anything but.

Re: Ruby for Good

#17

Post by QuantumNomad_ » Sun, May 24, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

graboid wrote: post #11

block_dagger wrote: post #3

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

I feel for a smallish project I'd rather prefer to have more readable, dense code like Ruby's over the ceremony of static types.

There is almost no ceremony involved in dealing with types in Rust.

And what little there is, is worth it ten-fold for all of the runtime bug headaches that you avoid compared to dynamically typed languages.

Re: Ruby for Good

#18

Post by pelagicAustral » Sun, May 24, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

BirAdam wrote: post #4

block_dagger wrote: post #3

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

Why go halfway with Rust when you could just pick Ada SPARK? Seems like an arbitrary choice based off of rationalizing a trend.

I feel like your comment is a bit tongue in cheek and i am going to take it at face value, but I honestly been feeling increasingly more like doing verbatim what you're suggesting and i dont have a very solid justification for it.

Re: Ruby for Good

#19

Post by vidarh » Sun, May 24, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

block_dagger wrote: post #3

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

Agents handle Ruby just fine. I used to have to give them some stern rules about avoiding instance_variable_get etc. instead of adding accessors, but those problems have pretty much vanished in the last 6 months.

I like using Ruby with agents because the code remains short and readable.

Re: Ruby for Good

#20

Post by lexoj » Sun, May 24, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

hoten wrote: post #12

m12k wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The typescript team themselves rewrote the compiler in Go to get better use of coding agents.

They started that migration years ago. I don't remember them citing agentic coding as a reason. Do you have a source?

Not sure about the compiler but prominent users of llm agents (Mitchel Hashimoto, Armin Ronacher etc) has mentioned that Go gives better results for agentic coding.