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From Rust to Ruby

xlii.space

41–50 of 108 posts

Re: From Rust to Ruby

#41
post #3

At first I thought this would be an interesting article, but as soon as they mentioned using an LLM to do the conversion I lost all interest. It's like saying "I wanted this done so I got my underling to do it, here is my story...". Like why would I bother to read it then, as it was clearly not you doing the conversion or putting any thought into it.

The biggest problem is that this is software development going forward.

Programming languages don't really matter outside craft programming.

As LLM improve, it will eventually be a matter to specify in which kind of language the specification should be generated.

The UML and RUP crowd has had their vengeance.

Re: From Rust to Ruby

#42
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s short term happiness at best, and at the expense of every other possible architectural characteristic (maintainability, performance, reliability, scalability, you name it).

Updating Rails is one of the most painful processes ever. There is no real way to be sure it works. You just have to have 50,000 unit tests, cypress tests, and then hope and pray. On any sufficiently large and old app, something will always break in a way that isn't caught by your tests or manual testing, and only shows up after it goes out live.

Honest question: what’s an example of a fully-featured web framework that makes upgrading a “large & old” application painless? In my experience, upgrading an underlying framework that a piece of complex software depends upon without breaking everything pretty much always requires time & good test coverage.

Re: From Rust to Ruby

#43

I'm not sure any language + framework prioritizes developer happiness as much as Ruby on Rails.

I have been pretty happy with Java and .NET frameworks, regardless of the lack of appeal in SV influenced circles.

Happiness doesn't always translate into performance, e.g. famous Twitter logo until they moved into JVM and Scala.

While Ruby on Rails took the fame, we already had similar experiences with AOLServer and Vignette, using Tcl.

We had our own variant at a Portuguese startup, and eventually the founders created OutSystems, one of the first graphical RAD tools for Websites and distributed systems development in low code/no code, targeting JVM or CLR infrastructure.

Now having said all of this, it is great to finally see CRuby getting a JIT in the box.

Re: From Rust to Ruby

#44
post #41
post #3

At first I thought this would be an interesting article, but as soon as they mentioned using an LLM to do the conversion I lost all interest. It's like saying "I wanted this done so I got my underling to do it, here is my story...". Like why would I bother to read it then, as it was clearly not you doing the conversion or putting any thought into it.

The biggest problem is that this is software development going forward. Programming languages don't really matter outside craft programming. As LLM improve, it will eventually be a matter to specify in which kind of language the specification should be generated. The UML and RUP crowd has had their vengeance.

It doesn't have to be, we have the power to change it by just not using LLMs to generate code-like text sequences.

But if anyone is having their revenge it is the "idea guys", not the UML jockeys.

Re: From Rust to Ruby

#45
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Updating Rails is one of the most painful processes ever. There is no real way to be sure it works. You just have to have 50,000 unit tests, cypress tests, and then hope and pray. On any sufficiently large and old app, something will always break in a way that isn't caught by your tests or manual testing, and only shows up after it goes out live.

Honest question: what’s an example of a fully-featured web framework that makes upgrading a “large & old” application painless? In my experience, upgrading an underlying framework that a piece of complex software depends upon without breaking everything pretty much always requires time & good test coverage.

Most Java and .NET ones, not everything breaks, statically compiled, so not as many unit tests required as in dynamic languages.

While it is deprecated, you can do a File=>New Project for Web Forms in 2026.

Re: From Rust to Ruby

#46

Idk why people are shitting on you. So many LLM haters on here. It’s changed the game completely and some people just don’t want to accept it. I think this is cool. Verbosity of languages is important when it comes to coding with AI. I’ve found Go to be a happy medium.

If you replaced "AI" with "a developer" in this article, it might make more sense why it's being dunked on. It would be an article about someone telling someone to do something, and then when the work was done they were happy with the result. It's just a bit of a nothing all round

> and then when the work was done they were happy with the result

It's worse than that -- they don't even know the result! They never tried to run it!

Re: From Rust to Ruby

#48

People think Ruby is slower than Rust, they'll be surprised to know Ruby is actually now faster than python but slower than Go or Rust.

Why would someone who thinks Ruby is slower than Rust (which apparently includes you) be surprised it’s faster than Python? Why does one thing have to do with the other?

Re: From Rust to Ruby

#49
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Updating Rails is one of the most painful processes ever. There is no real way to be sure it works. You just have to have 50,000 unit tests, cypress tests, and then hope and pray. On any sufficiently large and old app, something will always break in a way that isn't caught by your tests or manual testing, and only shows up after it goes out live.

Honest question: what’s an example of a fully-featured web framework that makes upgrading a “large & old” application painless? In my experience, upgrading an underlying framework that a piece of complex software depends upon without breaking everything pretty much always requires time & good test coverage.

Type safety would fix 99% of the issues I've had upgrading Rails.
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