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

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

#161

Post by joelbluminator »

treeman79 wrote: post #99
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 left python for ruby A dozen years ago. I always missed the simplicity of Python. Ruby community was just awesome. Pushing at the bleeding edge of getting stuff done fast, if a bit magical. Been debating about going back. Cleaning up 8 year old magical ruby apps is getting old.

Off topic, but how do you evaluate whether you should switch stacks? I have lots of Ruby experience and am not that young anymore. The "easy" thing for me to do is sticking to Ruby, but I'm sometimes anxious about the availability of jobs 10-15 years from now.

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

#162

Post by pimterry »

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

There are absolutely Ruby jobs out there that will pay your bills, and it's absolutely a successful ecosystem with which you can build effective modern products.

That said, in 2020 if you're picking a language, I don't think it has the most jobs available (probably JS), or the best paid jobs available (something ML, maybe Python), or the most interesting jobs available (up to you). For similar reasons, I'm not sure it's the best language to pick for a new product - it doesn't have the largest community or most momentum nowadays, it's neither the forefront of powerful tech nor the backbone of rock-solid boring tech.

If you already know Ruby, or you just want to learn it anyway, it's definitely not a bad choice. If you're choosing afresh though with no specific reason to pick Ruby, it's probably not the right choice.

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

#163

Post by joelbluminator »

lmm wrote: post #133
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

Broad generalisations incoming: I don't see a lot of new and exciting things being done in Ruby, and I don't think it's a popular choice for highly technical companies any more; even if you find one company doing cool stuff with it, do you want to be looking for a job in 5 years' time having spent 5 years in Ruby? Rails is still the fastest way to bang out a CRUD webapp, and there's a lot of companies who use those w…

Well there's all the companies that were built around 2006-2015 with Ruby, when Rails was hot stuff. Many of them can't afford migrating to a new stack, or want to. But generally I kinda agree - more is being created with other stack nowadays. A byproduct of that is way more people learn Python / Java as a first language, so you also perhaps need to think if being a Python guy gives you any edge when you turn 45-50 as hordes of young people learn it as we speak. Outsourcing a Python project is gonna be way easier 10 years from now than doing the same with Ruby. I don't have clear answers btw, there's just pros and cons.

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

#164

Post by Veen »

brazzy wrote: post #140
thom wrote: post #12

I've always felt this was a singular achievement, one which perfectly captured the spirit of its author, the community he inhabited, and a particular zeitgeist in programming and on the internet. The need for various other authors to attempt to replicate it for other languages by creating rambling, twee books with wacky titles and comic characters of their own, I've frankly found a bit sad and underwhelming. It's a b…

> And yet the joke is replicated endlessly as if each time it's possible for it to be new. Quite the opposite. It's replicated because it's now become a trope. "Repetition is the essential comedic device": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedic_device#Repetition

When you've heard your kid tell the same "knock knock" joke 50 times, you'll realize that repetition alone isn't enough. Repetition is an important part of humour and communication in general, but context, surprise, originality, irony, and wit matter too.

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

#166

Post by nl »

joelbluminator wrote: post #157
berkes wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They're gonna run into very similar problems.

Once they get the build fixed. Again.

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

#167

Post by nl »

porker wrote: post #153
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.

> 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.

I agree.

I couldn't stand DHH's "I'm right" attitude about everything. I listened about programming and then he started talking about things I know lots about and I realised he wasn't exactly wrong, just hadn't seen other ways of doing things.

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

#168

Post by lazyatom »

hencq wrote: post #132
zem wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep, "mousehole". it was used to effectively add a hidden comment section to random pages.

I remember that too, but I thought it was called hoodwinked or something close to that.

IIRC, mousehole was an alternative DNS system, and hoodwink'd was the hidden-content-layered-on-existing-websites.

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

#169

Post by nailer »

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…

Odd. I ended up in the Python world, but printed out a copy of Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and read it because it reminded me that making stuff is fun.

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

#170

Post by ImprobableTruth »

cambalache wrote: post #110
dialamac wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see your point. A large base of Nim users are looking for a pragmatic alternative to the C/C++ family without the aggressive anti-modernism of Go. Nim is certainly not the only player in this realm, but far as I know there isn’t a “Nim Drama” Twitter or tumblr. The drama queen stereotype of Ruby and Rails is very well earned on a repeated basis. All the communities have had their dramas but Ruby and Rust to a…

> A large base of Nim users are looking for a pragmatic alternative to the C/C++ family without the aggressive anti-modernism of Go. You guys make this too easy. Unless it was sarcasm, so whoosh me, and chapeau!

Well, you sure make a good case for Rubyists being incredibly pretentious.
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