Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where does Ruby go from here?

blog.sefindustries.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 93 posts

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#51

Post by paulhauggis »

tmorton wrote: post #38
angersock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really nice feel-good list, but it also doesn't make a lot of sense in several cases: "We value open-source frameworks and libraries over developing for popular ecosystems." Most popular ecosystems nowadays are all open-source frameworks and libraries? Unless you're talking about Windows or Mac OSX, I guess? "We value inclusiveness, diversity, and respect over pure meritocracy." These are not mutually exclus…

I think this comment shows exactly what I was getting at. If no one disagrees, the happiness manifesto will die in a sea of nods and shrugs. :) > I'd rather have really good code, even if written by a racist or sexist, than bad code (period). That's a perfectly valid choice. In some cases, it's a completely correct choice. But that's not the tradeoff that I want to make. Take a look at the original Agile Manifesto: h…

"That's a perfectly valid choice. In some cases, it's a completely correct choice. But that's not the tradeoff that I want to make."

The problem is that it's used too often to shun or control people that don't agree with a political ideology. A good example of this is the Mozilla CEO.

An open and "accepting" community should also accept people they might not agree with..otherwise you should't call yourself open, accepting, or inclusive.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#52

Post by rubiquity »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #40
tmorton wrote: post #5

I think this is a great idea. The ruby community is a wonderful thing, and part of that is reflected in the technology. However, the original Agile Manifesto was powerful because it made tradeoffs. "We value X over Y", even when Y is a valuable thing. For this HDD thing to take off, it has to make the similar tradeoffs explicit. For example: We value readable code over runtime performance. We value open-source framew…

The Agile Manifesto is the opposite of tradeoffs. "We value X over Y" is not a trade off, it's a dogmatic claim. "We should do X in these conditions and Y otherwise" is a trade off. For each of the items you list above, I can come up with a few scenarios where doing the opposite of what the Agile Manifesto says would be the better approach (and that's probably one of the main reasons why hardly anyone takes that Mani…

It is interpreted as a dogmatic claim but it wasn't intended to be one. After all, the very essence of the Agile Manifesto is to always be thinking.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#53

Post by elektronjunge »

ayrx wrote: post #32
danso wrote: post #2

I would love Ruby to become the goto "glue" language between different platforms and applications. I confess to not being more than a layperson in Perl, even though Ruby is heavily inspired by it...could Ruby ever replace Perl as the "Swiss-army chainsaw of scripting"? Or are their technical hurdles (such as performance) that would keep Ruby from being that kind of status quo?

The advantage that Python or Perl has over Ruby is that they are included by default with most major Linux distros. I don't think (I may be wrong) that Ruby is. This might hurt adoption somewhat.

Ruby is included in most major distros.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#54

Post by kyllo »

nchuhoai wrote: post #22

I think the single best thing that Ruby can do in terms of making me even happier is to make concurrent programming easier. I love Ruby and the Parallel gem ( https://github.com/grosser/parallel ) makes certain stuff easier, but I feel like every month or so I spend hours just trying to figure out the proper way on how to parallelize

Have you looked at the Julia language? http://julialang.org/

It has semantics very similar to Ruby or Python, but it has strong built-in language-level support for parallel computing: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/parallel-computin...

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#56

Post by scottefein12 »

programminggeek wrote: post #41

I wish "I value performance and user experience" was on there. I'm not sure how happy you should be as a self centered developer with no empathy for the people using your software. Sometimes software can and should be ugly if it makes for a better end product.

Full free to submit a pull request. The idea is to make sure the tools and practices make it so a developer is happy writing good, performant code with a good user experience. If the code is ugly and hard, people won't do it.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#57

Post by scoot »

danso wrote: post #2

I would love Ruby to become the goto "glue" language between different platforms and applications. I confess to not being more than a layperson in Perl, even though Ruby is heavily inspired by it...could Ruby ever replace Perl as the "Swiss-army chainsaw of scripting"? Or are their technical hurdles (such as performance) that would keep Ruby from being that kind of status quo?

One of the (many) great features of the Amiga was ARexx. Most non-trial productivity applications had an ARexx port (API), allowing workflows to be scripted, tasks to be automated, and functionality to be extended.

True preemptive multitasking probably also helped.

AppleScript doesn't come close, and on Windows sketchup is the only app I know of with anything similar, which happens to be Ruby. But you can't create great workflows in an ecosystem of 1, and I expect that ship has long since sailed.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#58

Post by bam365 »

The Happiness Manifesto? Happiness-driven developers? Enough, already. This is an interesting time for computer programming and computer science in general. We're witnessing the coming of age of a very important profession. We owe it to ourselves to advance this profession by developing a body of knowledge based on scientific, mathematical, and engineering principles, as well as empirical observation of what has worked and what hasn't. What we don't need is cultural manifestos and middle-management buzzwords.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

kybernetyk wrote: post #33
FraaJad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy that coined the word in the 1950s used the word in a negative sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology

I must admit I never read the school book definition of the word - so yeah, maybe I'm not understanding meritocracy. To me it means: The words/opinion of person with the most expertise on a certain topic should have the most weight in a discussion/decision. In that sense I don't care about gender, skin color, religion, etc. as long as the person knows what he/she is talking about. So I don't see how it would be oppos…

The one recurring problem with meritocracy is that there is a strong danger of misdefining the measure of merit.

(In the case of discussions of the tech industry, a common error of this type is the equation of "success in the environment as it exists" with "merit", which makes the claim of meritocracy neatly circular, but its not the only way this can go wrong.)

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#60

Post by jshen »

programminggeek wrote: post #44
scottefein12 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need a lightening fast API, anecdotal evidence suggests you just can't get it down to the speeds you see with Go. Rack/Ruby just isn't going to cut it.

You can get close if you don't use Rails. Seriously, Cuba + JRuby + Torquebox 4 is fast, nearly as fast as Go. http://madebymarket.com/blog/dev/ruby-web-benchmark-report.h...

I'm sorry, a hello world benchmark is meaningless.
Post reply on HN