121–130 of 282 posts
Why did NodeJS take off on the backend while Rails was still popular? I'll never understand it.
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> I remember being taught to use yacc in our compiler course because "writing it by hand is too hard". But looks like Ruby joins the growing list of languages that have hand-written parsers, apparently working with generated parsers turned out to be even harder in the long run. I've been writing parsers for simple (and sometimes not so simple) languages ever since i was in middle school and learned about recursive de…
My hot take is that the allure of parser-generators is mostly academic. If you're designing a language it's good practice to write out a formal grammar for it, and then it feels like it should be possible to just feed that grammar to a program and have it spit out a fully functional parser. In practice, parser generators are always at least a little disappointing, but that nagging feeling that it _should_ work remain…
Shopify strategy aka the story of YJIT If I cannot refactor my services, I shall refactor Ruby instead.
Always looking forward to the Christmas tradition of Ruby releases
Just now, I was surprised to see that the package seems to be getting put into the official Arch repos, so my eight years of very minimal volunteer service seem to be at an end. I still think I'm going to remember doing this and smile a little every Christmas morning for years to come!
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No wait, I know Oracle has a bad rep which is deserved, but TruffleRuby and GraalVM is truly open-source, not open-core. They actually did something great this time. Someone pointed this out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42323293
> You will need to sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement (using an online form) for us to able to review and merge your work. Read my lips: N. O. Read the CLA. This is a trap, do not get yourself or your company caught in it. It is open-source for now, until it gets enough traction. Then the rug will be pulled, the code will be relicensed as well as any further development or contributions. This is insane , I cannot…
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It seems like you're ignoring the context/environment. Ruby has enough advanced developers, large enough test suite and enough people who care about performance, that it can tackle the parser as a longer project regardless of its complexity. The same thing will apply to other popular languages. But it won't apply to smaller projects with very localised parser use. In those cases writing anything custom would be a was…
Having tried both on solo projects, I disagree: like other commenters here, I've found parser generators to be a big waste of time. Writing a parser by hand requires understanding the theory of parsing and understanding your implementation language. Writing a parser with a parser generator requires understanding the theory of parsing, your implementation language, and a gigantic black box that tries unsuccessfully to…
Do people who write predictive recursive descent parsers (LL(k)) really calculate first/follow sets by hand? What if the grammar requires backtracking?
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Rails has some very, very good features that make standing up a CRUD app with an administrative backend _very easy_. It's also got a bunch of semi-functional-programming paradigms throughout that make life quite a bit easier when you get used to using them. Honestly, if it had types by default and across all / most of its packages easily (no. Sorbet + Rails is pain, or at least was last I tried), I'd probably recomme…
If you're happy to trade the ecosystem and a bit of compilation speed for types, then Crystal is a perfectly cromulent choice.
1) It has differences in behavior with certain classes and is not a drop-in replacement.
2) It always compiles, so it's kind of slow to compile-test
I am most excited about the parser change, previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310130 - Rewriting the Ruby parser (2023-06-13, 176 comments) I remember being taught to use yacc in our compiler course because "writing it by hand is too hard". But looks like Ruby joins the growing list of languages that have hand-written parsers, apparently working with generated parsers turned out to be e…
Even then, yacc and bison are pretty solid overall. I believe Postgres still uses a yacc grammar today, as another high profile example. I'd arguebthr parsing of SQL is one or the least interesting thi.gs an RDBMS does, though.