Is ruby used outside of web dev (i.e., Ruby on Rails)? it seems like a nice cute language but I almost never hear about it.
Ruby 3.4 Highlights
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Re: Ruby 3.4 Highlights
#12Is ruby used outside of web dev (i.e., Ruby on Rails)? it seems like a nice cute language but I almost never hear about it.
At my day job we use Ruby with Sorbet to stitch together a large number of data engineering pipelines. It's a good choice since we also often stand up small Rails apps to expose the results from those pipelines, so we can keep everything in one language. The fluent functional approach it enables is pretty nice for that business logic (but I would not want to do it without the gradual typing on top). We do find ourselves glancing over at the Python ecosystem with envy from time to time but overall it has worked pretty well. As I've gotten better with it I find myself reaching for irb for more and more one-off tasks in the shell too.
Re: Ruby 3.4 Highlights
#13Is ruby used outside of web dev (i.e., Ruby on Rails)? it seems like a nice cute language but I almost never hear about it.
I think it's quite sad that Ruby is so associated with Rails. Ruby is one of my favorite languages and last time that I touched a Rails code was in 2017. Even in web dev Rails is not the only thing in Ruby, there's also Sinatra which is an elegant micro-framework for building HTTP APIs, similar to Flask.
Some projects that I remember that uses Ruby that are not related to web dev: Homebrew, Metasploit, Vagrant and Jekyll.
I also find Ruby very useful for shell scripts. I wrote a blog post about that some months ago, you can read it and the discussion about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40763640
Re: Ruby 3.4 Highlights
#14Is ruby used outside of web dev (i.e., Ruby on Rails)? it seems like a nice cute language but I almost never hear about it.
Definitely, although Rails is its most common use
Re: Ruby 3.4 Highlights
#15Re: Ruby 3.4 Highlights
#16Is ruby used outside of web dev (i.e., Ruby on Rails)? it seems like a nice cute language but I almost never hear about it.
Yup, I wrote smartcard reader programs in it. Some of them talk to a http server using async-http. It can be used for anything that Perl or Python is good at, well maybe except data science because Python really shines there. And irb is massively useful for everyday tasks.
Re: Ruby 3.4 Highlights
#17Is ruby used outside of web dev (i.e., Ruby on Rails)? it seems like a nice cute language but I almost never hear about it.
Yeah, I use it for everything between 5-lines-of-bash and a needs-a-compiled-language. You almost never hear about it, because it's mature. No big controversies, no huge fuckups or new versions that break everything, just a steady trickle of improvements.
Re: Ruby 3.4 Highlights
#18Is ruby used outside of web dev (i.e., Ruby on Rails)? it seems like a nice cute language but I almost never hear about it.
Yup, I wrote smartcard reader programs in it. Some of them talk to a http server using async-http. It can be used for anything that Perl or Python is good at, well maybe except data science because Python really shines there. And irb is massively useful for everyday tasks.
I wish I could reach for Kotlin as a kind of "Ruby with typing out of the box" but the lack of a good REPL is a real dealbreaker.
Re: Ruby 3.4 Highlights
#19Is ruby used outside of web dev (i.e., Ruby on Rails)? it seems like a nice cute language but I almost never hear about it.
Sure. I use it for almost everything, because it's so pleasant to use.
Re: Ruby 3.4 Highlights
#20Is ruby used outside of web dev (i.e., Ruby on Rails)? it seems like a nice cute language but I almost never hear about it.
Yes! In practice it's a scripting language similar in vein to Python, and it's used for similar things.
It's actually the language of choice for a lot of OpenSUSE projects as well, like the Open Build Service.
The reason you don't here much about it is because of its maturity.