MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby • Hacker News Board

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#101

Post by taf2 » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 1:46 PM UTC

Sivart13 wrote: post #77

drivingmenuts wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7549#note-2 Apparently, he and some of the key devs don't like design by committee or much in the way of bureaucracy.

The problem with reading too much into that comment is that the issue being commented on involves setting up an entire "design process" for ruby, including councils and voting and this and that. It's troublesome to conflate the bulk of that proposal with the reception of RubySpec itself. It may be that some of the Ruby folks would've been receptive to a more limited proposal like "all released versions of Ruby should…

Could also have submitted bug reports during the RC pointing to a failing ruby spec test especially the segfault...

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#102

Post by gowan » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 2:12 PM UTC

manyxcxi wrote: post #19

mahmoudimus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ruby devs attitudes in the discussions linked FTA makes me question the longevity of Ruby as a serious Enterprise language.

When did it become a serious Enterprise™ language? Not being flippant or denigrating Ruby, but when I do work for established enterprises, it's never in Ruby. Java, .NET, PHP, and occasionally Python. Just because startups use it to get off the ground quickly, or to build the front end of their website doesn't make it enterprise.

Ruby (MRI/JRuby) are gaining traction in automated testing at large enterprises. Ruby is easy to learn and integrates well with java.

Cucumber provides better reporting than JUnit/TestNG. For web testing you have watir. For SOAP services you have savon which IMO is much easier than SOAPUI. For RESTful web services you just make direct calls. Then there is sikuli for ad hoc GUIs.

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#103

Post by marktangotango » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 3:13 PM UTC

vorg wrote: post #85

It's disappointing to hear about such problems with Ruby. I hit the same problem with the Groovy Language spec when I first came across Groovy. Its creator, James Strachan, initiated an implementation, test kit, and spec all within 6 months of each other (impl beta-1 in Dec 2003, and spec JSR-241 in May 2004). The project managers who took over from him, Graeme Rocher and Guillaume Laforge, changed direction by stopp…

Are you sure you're not assigning to malice that which could be due to ignorance or indifference?

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#104

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 3:41 PM UTC

jagawhowho wrote: post #24

Ruby is about to die permanently. A language that copied emacs-lisp but with syntax? Lol that gives it features to impress the ignoramus majority but real Haskell or Lisp programmers know better.

[deleted]

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#105

Post by issaria » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 3:56 PM UTC

THIS Brian again, nobody uses rubinius and it doesn't hurt anyone. This guy has a long history of promoting rubinius by attacking MRI, first time I saw him was on Baruco 2013, if you watch the video, his attitude is so annoying. Evan Phoenix's Ruby implementation was an interesting project, but now totally ruined by this childish guy. Brian, my advise is to stop bitching about MRI and seriously improve the documentation of rubinius, the are many interesting topics on rubini.us, but most of them are WIP since forever.

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#106

Post by marktangotango » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 3:56 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #79

dankohn1 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are ignoring a decade of history in declaring Rails to be "dangerous for enterprise use". The reality is that Rails apps are used in thousands of enterprises around the world, as well as in "web-scale" businesses like Github, Airbnb, and Groupon. However, Rails (and specifically ActiveRecord) has a very specific design philosophy (see http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm... ) which does no…

The "enterprise" I work at uses a dozen little RoR apps to put a quick and dirty UI on some DB tables so analysts/sales/support folks can interact with the data. The main problem with Ruby in this kind of setting is that these internal tools are extremely hard to maintain because of backwards compatibility issues--which there are plenty due to lack of spec, organic language development etc. The effort to upgrade the…

This is the longterm perspective thats rarely seen here, thank you.

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#107

Post by nedbat » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 5:37 PM UTC

nateberkopec wrote: post #100

vidarh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an absolutely terrifying attitude from a language developer....

Is it? Python is exactly the same . It has no language spec (defined by its implementatation), and it has a BDFL who hasn't pushed for one.

It would be good for Python to have more rigor in its definition. But the situation here doesn't have an analog in the Python world: there is no "PythonSpec" third-party test suite that is a) more complete than the official suite, b) exposing segfaults in previously working code, and c) going unused by the core developers.

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#108

Post by whistlerbrk » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #54

lgleason wrote: post #38

Both Charles Nutter and Matz are smart guys. They are also both great people. I say this having spent time with both of them. This whole, my implementation is better than theirs coming from Brian is crazy. Matz and Charles have helped to set the tone for the community. While I appreciate Brian's passion, it sounds like he needs to check his ego. No matter how smart we are, we can always learn things from other people…

He might need to check his ego, but the state of Ruby specification is deplorable, and despite being a big fan of Ruby, it's also a big road block to development. The small number of mature Ruby runtimes is a bad sign.

See, iirc, Matz years ago specifically said "fork Ruby". He wants lots of different versions which I feel to some extent means diverging from a formal spec, and then occasionally maybe coming back to it.

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#109

Post by krschultz » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

lnanek2 wrote: post #46

Matz is the creator of Ruby. If this guy really wanted to play ball, why didn't he just submit PRs for improving the real Ruby's test suite? Instead he just made his own thing, well duh it didn't end up a part of the real Ruby. OK, a hosting provider wanted their own Ruby implementation to fix concurrency issues, but that doesn't suddenly make the creator of the language have to do things their way. If you fork or re…

That glosses over all of the arguments the OP made about making a test suite that can work with all implementations of Ruby.

Re: MRI Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby

#110

Post by krschultz » Thu, Jan 01, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #11

joevandyk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? It contains 10 reasons why the MRI tests aren't sufficient.

The Ruby devs also doesn't use any libraries I wrote, and that's okay. Why is RubySpec the special sauce that is so special that the devs not using it is horrible?

RubySpec is nothing more than Ruby code doing things that worked in the previous version. Whenever it breaks, that is a regression in MRI.

Arguably it's no different than something breaking in your current Ruby program, and after spending a bunch of time debugging you realize it is a problem in MRI. If that happens, you would file a bug against MRI. RubySpec just makes it more apparent.