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Ruby Together

rubytogether.org

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Re: Ruby Together

#11

Post by aerovistae »

mooreds wrote: post #3
aerovistae wrote: post #2

I'm a a typescript/java engineer. I would say my lifetime code stats are probably around 40% JS / 35% Typescript / 15% Java / 8% Python / 2% other. That is to say, I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language. I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so…

What would convince you? * top companies using it? (shopify, github, stripe) * number of stars on github for projects? https://github.com/rails/rails has 50k stars * place in the Redmonk language rankings? https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-2... shows it at #9 * ability to get a good paying job? https://marketing.dice.com/pdf/2020/Dice_2020_Tech_Salary_Re... has the ruby salary at 114k, more t…

It didn't come across as combative at all, no worries. I find it pretty convincing to be honest. If anything I think the biggest hold-up is that I can get jobs as a senior front-end engineer but if I looked for Ruby jobs I'd kind of be taking 2 steps back down in terms of what I can contribute.

Frankly I'm not a fast learner, unfortunately. Although it's possible that I've convinced myself of that because I hate the Java ecosystem so much that my brain just doesn't want to absorb information about gradle and intellij configuration and java dependency management and so on.

Re: Ruby Together

#12

Post by mooreds »

mekster wrote: post #10
mooreds wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would convince you? * top companies using it? (shopify, github, stripe) * number of stars on github for projects? https://github.com/rails/rails has 50k stars * place in the Redmonk language rankings? https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-2... shows it at #9 * ability to get a good paying job? https://marketing.dice.com/pdf/2020/Dice_2020_Tech_Salary_Re... has the ruby salary at 114k, more t…

What you say means it's worth learning if you can land in the right company which is quite risky. Besides, unless a language has a strong point compared to others, it's a hard sell, like PHP is good on web, JS is known by everyone and ecosystem is huge and python is good for ML and scientific stuff but what's the selling point of ruby besides rails? With that said I do like the language itself (but not the typing sys…

> what's the selling point of ruby?

I'd say it is custom webapp development (with rails) and scripting on the command line (anything bash can do, ruby can do better).

PHP is good on the web with the huge installed base of wordpress, but when it comes to custom web app development, ruby (well, rails, really) holds its own with laravel, symfony and the other MVC frameworks.

Re: Ruby Together

#13

Post by dghlsakjg »

aerovistae wrote: post #2

I'm a a typescript/java engineer. I would say my lifetime code stats are probably around 40% JS / 35% Typescript / 15% Java / 8% Python / 2% other. That is to say, I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language. I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so…

As a ruby specialist it has never been hard to find a job including in positions that aren’t in ruby.

Re: Ruby Together

#14

Post by scrose »

aerovistae wrote: post #11
mooreds wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would convince you? * top companies using it? (shopify, github, stripe) * number of stars on github for projects? https://github.com/rails/rails has 50k stars * place in the Redmonk language rankings? https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-2... shows it at #9 * ability to get a good paying job? https://marketing.dice.com/pdf/2020/Dice_2020_Tech_Salary_Re... has the ruby salary at 114k, more t…

It didn't come across as combative at all, no worries. I find it pretty convincing to be honest. If anything I think the biggest hold-up is that I can get jobs as a senior front-end engineer but if I looked for Ruby jobs I'd kind of be taking 2 steps back down in terms of what I can contribute. Frankly I'm not a fast learner, unfortunately. Although it's possible that I've convinced myself of that because I hate the…

I went from being mostly frontend focused to working almost exclusively on backend and while I was able to get a generous pay bump, I found that I was generally much happier to just be working with Ruby/Rails almost full-time. Even though I was not as proficient right away.

I guess what I’m trying to say is if you end up focusing on working only with what you’re proficient at, you may be missing out on other opportunities that you may end up enjoying more long-term.

Re: Ruby Together

#15

Post by girvo »

mooreds wrote: post #12
mekster wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say means it's worth learning if you can land in the right company which is quite risky. Besides, unless a language has a strong point compared to others, it's a hard sell, like PHP is good on web, JS is known by everyone and ecosystem is huge and python is good for ML and scientific stuff but what's the selling point of ruby besides rails? With that said I do like the language itself (but not the typing sys…

> what's the selling point of ruby? I'd say it is custom webapp development (with rails) and scripting on the command line (anything bash can do, ruby can do better). PHP is good on the web with the huge installed base of wordpress, but when it comes to custom web app development, ruby (well, rails, really) holds its own with laravel, symfony and the other MVC frameworks.

As someone with years (oh god, so many years) of experience in Laraval and Symfony, I think Rails is superior to both. They're all excellent mind you, I just think Rails is even nicer in usage.

Re: Ruby Together

#16

Post by filoeleven »

axelthegerman wrote: post #7
aerovistae wrote: post #2

I'm a a typescript/java engineer. I would say my lifetime code stats are probably around 40% JS / 35% Typescript / 15% Java / 8% Python / 2% other. That is to say, I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language. I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so…

I understand job security and demand is important. But for me the most important has always been to enjoy myself as much as possible. That's also how I can do my best every day. If that means having a 10% lower salary or half the number of job postings I'm fine with it. If I really needed to find a non Ruby job I'm sure I still could, there's enough demand in general.

This is similar to my take, only I never ever want to work with Ruby, since it just rubs me the wrong way. This is a throwaway comment unless you care about the following question.

What is the the fundamental difference between Ruby and Lisp enthusiasts? The easy answer is OOP vs FP, but as soon as you dive into the details the distinction becomes more difficult. A thread [vs] between Alan Kay and Rich Hickey is perhaps informative, but not illustrative.

I know that I lean towards lisp, but I cannot articulate why lisp usage fits my mental model more readily than smalltalk/ruby does. Is the gulf between Lisp- and Smalltalk-inspired languages that meaningful?

[vs] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722

Re: Ruby Together

#17

Post by heshiebee »

aerovistae wrote: post #2

I'm a a typescript/java engineer. I would say my lifetime code stats are probably around 40% JS / 35% Typescript / 15% Java / 8% Python / 2% other. That is to say, I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language. I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so…

Hey, the company I work for is hiring engineers for a Ruby On Rails app. My info is in my bio.

Re: Ruby Together

#18

Post by ta988 »

axelthegerman wrote: post #5
seiferteric wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual reason given is lack of libraries compared to python. I started a project a while ago with the idea that you could create a ruby library that would implement the C python extension API using the ruby C extension library... I got some basic stuff working, so you could "import" a basic python C extension in ruby (after recompiling it against my headers/library). Then you can use a python -> ruby transpiler (w…

I'm not sure what Python library you couldn't find an equivalent for in rubygems. I never had a problem finding what I needed. (Maybe some ML or related fields?) Depending on the size of the library it might make sense to rewrite it. Using C extensions is more popular than Python or other languages

Many things in rubygems are unmaintained, prototypes or really incomplete.

Re: Ruby Together

#20

Post by dcchambers »

aerovistae wrote: post #2

I'm a a typescript/java engineer. I would say my lifetime code stats are probably around 40% JS / 35% Typescript / 15% Java / 8% Python / 2% other. That is to say, I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language. I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so…

Give it a go. Ruby (and Rails) aren't going anywhere. There are far too many companies that are perfectly happy and successful with rails-based apps.

Name a tech unicorn from the last 15 years, they probably have some ruby/rails code that is foundational to the company. Many have adopted microservices and newer languages like Go, but the core Ruby codebases aren't going away any time soon.

Even outside of the rails ecosystem, ruby is a wonderful scripting language for writing small tools with. I prefer it to Python when I need something more powerful than bash/sh.

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