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

Is Ruby Dying?

jmoses.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 159 posts

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#121

Post by Moto7451 »

makomk wrote: post #28
jerf wrote: post #4

You just may not be used to Ruby not having the exciting fire of initial hype. That is dead. But that's good. Languages can't live like that forever. Sooner or later they need to stop the wild experimenting, find some best practices and things that work, and settle down and ram home the things that work. Ruby has entered final maturity. It will be in that phase until such time as it really does die, which could well…

I think Perl has already reached the state where it's mostly used in legacy code, at least for web development.

I work at a Perl based startup and we're writing new code and designing new systems all the time. There seems to be quite a few Perl shops in LA though most of them have been around for a long time.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#122

Post by Solarsail »

morganherlocker wrote: post #64
Sanddancer wrote: post #13

First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project. Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important, new kid in town be damned. Second off, number of package releases doesn't tell much about maturity of packages, developer involvement, or anything. Ruby's a mature language. It's quite feasible, and arguably desirable, for package releases t…

> First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project. I think there is a minimum threshold to this. I support a large application written in an extremely obscure language (it's basically me and 5 other people on an old yahoo mailing list that make up the entire community). It is terrible. No unit testing frameworks, no http framework for rest calls, no decent UI…

Out of nearly-off-topic-curiosity, does this language have a website(page)? Was it new when you started your project? Have you been able to use libraries from other languages? Or is this really an island of 5 people? (Suddenly that sounds like Gilligan's island for devs)

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#123

Post by auxbuss »

laureny wrote: post #69
Touche wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important That's the most overstated claim in programming. LESS is the "right tool for the job" when the job is styling web pages. Ruby is a general purpose programming language, the jobs it is good for is everything not covered by DSLs like LESS, the same as all other general purpose languages.

> Ruby is a general purpose programming language I question that. Ruby is very slow, dynamically typed and suffers from scaling challenges because of its multithreading support. I think Ruby is increasingly falling into a niche: prototyping. Get a prototype up and running in a few weeks and once the proof of concept is established, switch to a statically typed language on the JVM.

Not at all, as the latest web framework benchmarks showed: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7... (see rack-jruby, 86.3%)

It's really a question of how and what you run. And yes, the JVM is one of those options.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#124

Post by kamaal »

elbear wrote: post #120
kamaal wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though). This may be true for Ruby to some extent. But Python as a design goal aims to provide as little power to the programmer as possible. In fact, the Zen of Python says almost anything that comes in the way should and must be sacrificed to achieve readability. One can probably write a book on why one…

What does power represent to you? Simplicity and readability offer power as far as I'm concerned.

In that case Assembly language programming should be sufficient right? That's as simple and readable as it can get.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#125

Post by lstamour »

jerf wrote: post #102
lstamour wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go's been out 4 years while Dart just hit 1.0 and requires a runtime as it's a bit less portable. Once Dart lands in Chrome, I can easily imagine it becoming the first choice of developers who prefer to develop code in their browser. A niche market now, but interesting to contemplate. I'm a bit more flexible when it comes to trying to predict the future than my posts indicate. I'm just offering an alternative hypothe…

Oh, I see, that makes sense. For me, I was making broad predictions. No matter how exciting the web client dev is, it is and will remain still a niche, and Dart faces a huge challenge in the next 5 years as asm.js will relatively suddenly introduce it to competition from every other mainstream language in existence. Dart probably won't "die" for a while, but I'm not sure it won't end up "just another" one of the enor…

I've learned to not bet against the ingenuity of Google engineers, particularly those building web browsers and development tools. :) Given that they've added very basic support for editing to Developer Tools in Chrome already, once Dart lands in Chrome, I could see a push to make Chrome the editor-of-choice for Dart, if not web-based editors in general. And it's true, there's more to development than type-and-run interactive shells, but that sure makes web development easier, doesn't it? asm.js benefits Dart as well, since they can target the same approaches for their JS target code gen.

The real question is when will Google add development alternatives to Android? Chrome's nice, but it takes a mobile platform to sustain an ecosystem of client-side developers these days. Perhaps Chrome-on-Android will eventually become the new PhoneGap?

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#126

Post by hosh »

mortyseinfeld wrote: post #94
hosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true if you're considering making something. On the other hand, if you are learning a language or platform in order to expand your capabilities as a thinker and problem solver, then community size is less of a consideration.

I'm starting to think that the ROI on "learn Haskell and/or Clojure to expand your horizons" isn't there, even though I hate mainstream/modern OO so those languages would fit my mindset.

Maybe, maybe not. That kind of stuff is harder to quantify.

I know just the little bit of Scheme and Haskell has transformed how I think and my thought patterns. I can say the same about learning to play Go (the game, not the language).

Now, whether you get anything out of it, that's up to you. It's not really about learning a language that fit your mindset so much as learning a language to change and expand one's mindset. If you expect a language to fit your mindset, then you're unlikely to get anything out of it. In which case, definitely stick with the popular languages with a lot of community support. That has a pretty good ROI too.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#127

Post by jboggan »

Moto7451 wrote: post #121
makomk wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Perl has already reached the state where it's mostly used in legacy code, at least for web development.

I work at a Perl based startup and we're writing new code and designing new systems all the time. There seems to be quite a few Perl shops in LA though most of them have been around for a long time.

Perl's my mother tongue (started in bioinformatics) but I've been doing a lot of Ruby at my current gig in LA. That being said, I miss Perl's syntax and autovivification. I did a hackathon project with Perl at work, and my punishment for winning was porting it to Java for production.

Drop me a line Moto7451, I'm always interested in meeting local (Perl) hackers.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#128

Post by lowmagnet »

dasil003 wrote: post #98
hahainternet wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in Manchester. I write new Perl code. Python is Perl with a little nicer syntax and a shitload of baggage from overly opinionated people. Ruby is Perl with a little nicer syntax and no other advantages. I have found no compelling reason to switch, and lots of annoyances that don't seem to exist in Perl.

I'm actually a big fan of Perl, but your characterization of Ruby is wrong. Ruby is Perl with object-orientation first, nicer syntax is a minor detail after that.

Ruby also now has a VM, which people may or may not find more useful. I for one prefer Ruby 1.9.x to 1.8.x.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#129

Post by skinnycow »

danielrhodes wrote: post #78
jerf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the JVM to still be going; at least one of Clojure or Scala will probably continue growing for a long time, and there's room for both. It's also possible another Algol-esque language that isn't Java, but is syntactically closer to Java, making people more comfortable, will arise. At some point one of them may even become the "primary" JVM language, with Java hanging on as legacy, but due to the fact Java jus…

I like Go, but in my opinion it is not an appropriate language for building web applications. It makes for great sub-components of a larger stack which are focused and do relatively low-level tasks (networking, file serving, caching, etc.). It is also great for scripting where you need easy out-of-the-box concurrency.

As long as you ignore the fact that Google is writing production web services, 90%+ of Go projects are webservices, and it's beats the absolute pants off of Ruby for performance.

Have you ever even written a webservice in Go?

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#130

Post by deviltry »

weatherlight wrote: post #79
danso wrote: post #12

Ugh...must not take Lord's name in vain. 14 points in almost as many minutes? Is it so easy to get to the top of HackerNews on a holiday with such a loaded question? I can't imagine how many points the OP would've gotten if the title was "Is Ruby Dying Faster than MongoDB?" That said, as a pro-Rubyist...well, I don't find much comfort in the OP's spurious assumptions about what the data can show. However, for those w…

Ruby IS dying faster than MongoDB! Evidence to prove it! http://bit.ly/1c9vo1S

Well with evidence like that Ruby is pretty much dead in the water.

Happy holidays.

Post reply on HN