Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#151

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 9:14 AM UTC

burgertime wrote: post #123

antod wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a perfect world Ruby would have left Python in the dust It pretty much did, but then Rails and Ruby's hype cycle faded a bit, and Python kept going, recovered and found new niches.

You left out Python 3. That lack of a clear transition from Python 2 didn’t help. Despite that, I still think it’s great, but it made it multiple times more difficult for a newbie to get setup.

I've not done Python outside playing around really early on in my career during an internship, but I've never felt attracted to it; the 2 vs 3 debacle, installing the odd tool is like "what" (yeah just do `pip install this`, but first you need to install pip by using `easy_install`), and I've heard dependency management and environment setup is still quite backwards.

It needs a big ecosystem and tooling overhaul for me to be interested.

ATM I'm doing Go, which seems to have gotten the tooling part right at least.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#152

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 9:19 AM UTC

blueblisters wrote: post #145

tartoran wrote: post #51

Ruby is an appealing language for sure , but is it worth learning it in 2020, with the intention of getting paid for one’s work? It is an honest question and in no way am i trashing the language. Just curious what others have to say about it

Shopify (along with its millions of shops) is probably the biggest user of Rails (with Ruby) in production. Aside from them, not sure who uses Ruby at that scale.

https://stackshare.io/rails is a reasonable source to see what company uses Rails; notable entries are Github, AirBnB, Twitch, etc. Mind you it doesn't really say what / how much of those things are made with Rails. Github definitely uses it a lot though: https://github.blog/2019-09-09-running-github-on-rails-6-0/

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#153

Post by porker » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 9:47 AM UTC

antod wrote: post #106

cutler wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In a perfect world Ruby would have left Python in the dust and enterprise software would be written in Clojure.

> In a perfect world Ruby would have left Python in the dust It pretty much did, but then Rails and Ruby's hype cycle faded a bit, and Python kept going, recovered and found new niches.

> It pretty much did, but then Rails and Ruby's hype cycle faded a bit

It was Rails' hype cycle that turned me off using Ruby & Rails in the first place. It had more in common with the cult I grew up with than I wanted to be part of, and made it hard for a sceptical outsider to get in.

Which is a shame as I think I'd have enjoyed it very much.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#154

Post by jablan » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

Although I am fascinated by _why's personality and his art, I think this book is partly to blame that Ruby is not as popular as it could (and should) have been. It somehow embodies that proto-hipster vibe the Ruby community used to have at the beginning, which alienated a lot of potential users. Luckily I managed to overcome that initial hurdle (the Pickaxe book helped a lot), but a lot of (good) developers I know haven't, and lots of them stayed with ASP (and its later offspring) and PHP.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#155

Post by barnabee » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 10:13 AM UTC

jablan wrote: post #154

Although I am fascinated by _why's personality and his art, I think this book is partly to blame that Ruby is not as popular as it could (and should) have been. It somehow embodies that proto-hipster vibe the Ruby community used to have at the beginning, which alienated a lot of potential users. Luckily I managed to overcome that initial hurdle (the Pickaxe book helped a lot), but a lot of (good) developers I know ha…

Holistically, even if this is true, I'd take the book and lower popularity for Ruby over no book

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#156

Post by AQXt » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 10:17 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #95

mwcremer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Au contraire: https://garfieldminusgarfield.net (Although I suppose a case could be made for it still being "empty.")

And https://3eanuts.com/ which just removes the last panel from Peanuts strips, making them horribly gloomy.

Thanks for sharing this. TIL Linus has a little brother called Rerun.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#157

Post by joelbluminator » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 10:32 AM UTC

berkes wrote: post #142

cutler wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In a perfect world Ruby would have left Python in the dust and enterprise software would be written in Clojure.

I'm more and more convinced Rails has caused much of the demise of Ruby. As well as make it big in the first place. I love Ruby. And with a decade of fulltime Rails development, know and like both Rails and Ruby very well. But 'sharp knives' have caused just too many rails projects to become mudballs over time. This makes teams or companies 'move to language X'. When it really was (their use of) Rails causing the mud…

If those teams were all moving to Java / C# I would agree, but they mostly moved to Node. They're gonna run into very similar problems.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#158

Post by WJW » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 10:35 AM UTC

uncomputation wrote: post #71

leetrout wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a pretentiousness held in a group of language zealots. You don’t hear the same about Nim, for example(yet?), In my experience. I don’t deny Ruby’s impact on the industry I just have a hard time with the attitudes prevalent in the devs I’ve worked with... it is strikingly stereotypical.

> It really is a pretentiousness held in a group of language zealots. Can’t tell if this is ironic or not, but Rubyists are pretty well known as the friendliest out of all language communities, and have been for over a decade now

From my experience both inside the Ruby community and out, it is pretty much exclusively Rubyists saying that about themselves. Almost every community I've seen considers itself inclusive and friendly.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#159

Post by chaostheory » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 10:37 AM UTC

jablan wrote: post #154

Although I am fascinated by _why's personality and his art, I think this book is partly to blame that Ruby is not as popular as it could (and should) have been. It somehow embodies that proto-hipster vibe the Ruby community used to have at the beginning, which alienated a lot of potential users. Luckily I managed to overcome that initial hurdle (the Pickaxe book helped a lot), but a lot of (good) developers I know ha…

I feel that Python is more to blame for that. When you have two similar languages but one of them takes away the paradox of choice, it’s gets evident why more people would choose Python in the end.

I don’t get the hate for Why the Lucky Stiff. Why does every programming book need to be K&R? Not everyone wants to read something as dry as a white paper all the time.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#160

Post by jgilias » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 10:46 AM UTC

xrd wrote: post #28

_why was at the FOSCON at FreeGeek 10+ years ago. I walked up to him, and he looked at me and said "You look familiar." Looking back, I'm sure we had never met. I just think he probably did that to build connection with anyone he met, and I loved that moment with him. There was amazing intimacy that he created everywhere.

I'd think he'd do that to hedge against not recognizing someone whom he should've recognized and looking as a douchebag in the process. I hear that many recognizable people do this. At some point you just see so many people and many of them expect you to recognize them, so you just act as if you do recognize everyone.