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Is Ruby Dying?

jmoses.co

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Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#91

Post by taude »

ollysb wrote: post #26
jerf wrote: post #4

You just may not be used to Ruby not having the exciting fire of initial hype. That is dead. But that's good. Languages can't live like that forever. Sooner or later they need to stop the wild experimenting, find some best practices and things that work, and settle down and ram home the things that work. Ruby has entered final maturity. It will be in that phase until such time as it really does die, which could well…

This is it. I'm blown away by how productive I am with rails now. A couple of weeks back I replaced an entire backend, complete with an oauth provider, record versioning, caching etc. and it took 4 hours! And all done with the usual TDD etc. This is all thanks to the gems that are available. Most of them are 2nd or 3rd generation, they're focused, battle tested and well documented. It might not be the right tool for…

Wait until you have to update your rails and all your gems are no longer compatible.

Edit: removed "update for a security patch" because it's just updated.

Edit: to be fair, this is a common situation with many similar solutions.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#92

Post by dham »

laureny wrote: post #69
Touche wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important That's the most overstated claim in programming. LESS is the "right tool for the job" when the job is styling web pages. Ruby is a general purpose programming language, the jobs it is good for is everything not covered by DSLs like LESS, the same as all other general purpose languages.

> Ruby is a general purpose programming language I question that. Ruby is very slow, dynamically typed and suffers from scaling challenges because of its multithreading support. I think Ruby is increasingly falling into a niche: prototyping. Get a prototype up and running in a few weeks and once the proof of concept is established, switch to a statically typed language on the JVM.

Ruby the language is no more slow then Javascript the language is. Yes Javascript on IE8 engine is slow. On V8 it is not. Ruby on MRI is slow(though for most people, it's fast enough). Ruby on JVM is not.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#93

Post by delluminatus »

eropple wrote: post #57
delluminatus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I would expect to see still widely used: * Python - As a programming language for scientists and researchers, replacing Matlab and kin. * Go or Rust - A well-designed, modern language, easier to use than C++ but almost as fast, for enterprise applications or video games. Not sure about Google, but I hope Mozilla will still be around in 10 years. * Lua? - Not sure about this one... but it fills a niche…

C# - C# is replacing Java as the OO language of choice for big enterprise systems. I'm skeptical of this one. C# requires Windows Server or putting up with Mono's shit. The former sucks; the latter isn't great either. I'd bet that iterations on Java, as well as other JVM languages, will probably retain a significant edge long-term.

In my experience (admittedly limited to only 3 specific instances), large orgs. have absolutely no problem with using Windows Server (often alongside Linux servers as well). B2B technology is remarkably Windows-centric even now, and I expect it will only become more so as time passes and Microsoft improves its server software and the .NET ecosystem, which is still pretty immature compared to the JVM.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#94

Post by mortyseinfeld »

hosh wrote: post #61
mortyseinfeld wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project Very wrong. There are languages that I believe I would be very productive in, but can't justify the time investment because the community is so small that the related tools/libraries/frameworks aren't there.

That's true if you're considering making something. On the other hand, if you are learning a language or platform in order to expand your capabilities as a thinker and problem solver, then community size is less of a consideration.

I'm starting to think that the ROI on "learn Haskell and/or Clojure to expand your horizons" isn't there, even though I hate mainstream/modern OO so those languages would fit my mindset.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#95

Post by rubiquity »

danielrhodes wrote: post #78
jerf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the JVM to still be going; at least one of Clojure or Scala will probably continue growing for a long time, and there's room for both. It's also possible another Algol-esque language that isn't Java, but is syntactically closer to Java, making people more comfortable, will arise. At some point one of them may even become the "primary" JVM language, with Java hanging on as legacy, but due to the fact Java jus…

I like Go, but in my opinion it is not an appropriate language for building web applications. It makes for great sub-components of a larger stack which are focused and do relatively low-level tasks (networking, file serving, caching, etc.). It is also great for scripting where you need easy out-of-the-box concurrency.

This times a million. I think Go is awesome for a little bit of systems programming but I'd pull my hair out trying to make a robust Web application with it. I feel the same way about Node.js. I wouldn't use either of these for a public facing HTTP application but if I needed some hyper performant internal system using RPCs then I would use them.

Ruby's DSLs for writing things that Web application's need (serving HTML) are bar none the best. If I'm writing something that is serving HTML, I'm using Ruby all day, every day.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#96

Post by jerf »

steveklabnik wrote: post #77
jerf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the JVM to still be going; at least one of Clojure or Scala will probably continue growing for a long time, and there's room for both. It's also possible another Algol-esque language that isn't Java, but is syntactically closer to Java, making people more comfortable, will arise. At some point one of them may even become the "primary" JVM language, with Java hanging on as legacy, but due to the fact Java jus…

> Someone will probably be writing an OS kernel in Rust. There are two or three of these, at least at the stage where kmain is Rust code. I'd be really excited to see this develop further. I just don't have time for ever project I'd like to do :/

By that prediction, I did not just mean that someone wrote something in Rust that can boot and do kernel-y things... I mean that there will be a kernel project in progress that is not merely "intended to be serious competition someday", but something that you can seriously use for real, production projects as your computer's (or server's, or cell phone's, or something's) primary kernel/hypervisor/the thing actually running on the hardware. Indeed one of those projects may someday even become the kernel I am predicting, but I'd be very surprised if they are something anybody would seriously make their primary runtime today.

In other words, this is an extreme statement of confidence on my part that Rust is very likely to succeed in their goals of being a true system language replacement. (Contrast this with Go, which initially started out saying it was going to be "system" language, but they've clarified they mean something more like a serious application language rather than something you'd write an OS in. "Nobody" is going to write a kernel in Go.)

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#97

Post by mortyseinfeld »

pswenson wrote: post #59
delluminatus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I would expect to see still widely used: * Python - As a programming language for scientists and researchers, replacing Matlab and kin. * Go or Rust - A well-designed, modern language, easier to use than C++ but almost as fast, for enterprise applications or video games. Not sure about Google, but I hope Mozilla will still be around in 10 years. * Lua? - Not sure about this one... but it fills a niche…

"C# - C# is replacing Java as the OO language of choice for big enterprise systems." C# is held back by windows. I know there is mono, but enterprises aren't going to bet on mono. So I have to disagree with that.

C# is held back by windows

"The enterprise" (for the most part) isn't held back by Windows. That's just reality.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#98

Post by dasil003 »

hahainternet wrote: post #43
sim0n wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally haven't seen any new code being written in Perl during either my time in England or in the Bay Area. I don't really see a reason to use Perl when there are languages like Python and Ruby out there with easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though).

I am in Manchester. I write new Perl code. Python is Perl with a little nicer syntax and a shitload of baggage from overly opinionated people. Ruby is Perl with a little nicer syntax and no other advantages. I have found no compelling reason to switch, and lots of annoyances that don't seem to exist in Perl.

I'm actually a big fan of Perl, but your characterization of Ruby is wrong. Ruby is Perl with object-orientation first, nicer syntax is a minor detail after that.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#99

Post by delluminatus »

hahainternet wrote: post #43
sim0n wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally haven't seen any new code being written in Perl during either my time in England or in the Bay Area. I don't really see a reason to use Perl when there are languages like Python and Ruby out there with easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though).

I am in Manchester. I write new Perl code. Python is Perl with a little nicer syntax and a shitload of baggage from overly opinionated people. Ruby is Perl with a little nicer syntax and no other advantages. I have found no compelling reason to switch, and lots of annoyances that don't seem to exist in Perl.

Can you elaborate on Python's baggage? I'm simply curious.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#100

Post by lstamour »

jerf wrote: post #83
lstamour wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a Google-backed language to replace Rails, Golang has less of a shot IMHO. Mainly because the popularity of Rails stemmed initially from TextMate in the original screencasts. It'd be silly to say that's all that mattered so I'm going to merely strongly imply that without additional books or cookbooks, screen casts, etc. it's hard to see Golang taking off in a community that isn't already invested in learning it.…

"For a Google-backed language to replace Rails" It's not "replacing Rails", it's replacing new projects in what are today scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.). I see fewer people talking about Dart than I see doing things with Go. That said, I did finally beat Google Trends into producing [1], which is interesting. It was hard to convince Trends to show Dart as growing as quickly as Golang, though, so…

Go's been out 4 years while Dart just hit 1.0 and requires a runtime as it's a bit less portable. Once Dart lands in Chrome, I can easily imagine it becoming the first choice of developers who prefer to develop code in their browser. A niche market now, but interesting to contemplate.

I'm a bit more flexible when it comes to trying to predict the future than my posts indicate. I'm just offering an alternative hypothesis: Dart has many more screencasts and supported libraries from Google, including Angular.dart than Golang ever had, and it's only just hit 1.0. Golang has been fantastic for me to develop with, particularly on Google AppEngine and it's true Dart hasn't hit server-side popularity yet. But if we're predicting the future, based on JS and node.is alone, I'd suggest Dart has plenty of room to gain popularity quickly.

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