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

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

poignant.guide

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 213 posts

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

#171

Post by zingar »

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

I'm currently hunting Ruby roles in Europe (that will sponsor a visa to move continents) and it seems like recruiters do not have a lot of roles open for Ruby. They want to know about the Java that I did 10 years ago, or whether I have Kafka, Python and machine learning, or maybe some JS.

Maybe this has something to do with the few Ruby giants not taking CVs from recruiters, but those giants aren't calling me back either. :shrug, maybe it's just me.

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

#172

Post by inopinatus »

nicebyte wrote: post #42
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…

i don't think it was even funny the first time. reading this stuff i always feel like the author is trying to keep my attention by jiggling some car keys in front of my face as if i am an infant. this applies to books like learn you a haskell too.

I have a similar personal reaction but let’s recognise that the whimsical narrative mode of teaching appeals very greatly to many others, including folks that hadn’t previously realised they could program a computer too.

I do not require that my peers think in the same fashion as I do. Quite the opposite.

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

#173

Post by ForHackernews »

dialamac wrote: post #97
cambalache wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complains about the "pretentiousness" of Ruby developers (Out all the languages!). Proceeds to mention Nim. Rub his mustache, drink his kombucha a put another vinyl.

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…

Hardly anyone uses Nim. It's extremely niche, even compared to something like Rust. That's why there's no Nim infighting.

Before you can have dozens of people fighting about a thing, you need more than a dozen people to care about that thing.

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

#174

Post by ForHackernews »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #151
burgertime wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Python dependency/environment management situation is slowly improving. Poetry is quite good, IMO: https://python-poetry.org/

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

#175

Post by oblio »

tartoran wrote: post #74
aeontech wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, absolutely. Python has taken off in a major way for data science / machine learning work, but Ruby is still a fantastic option for web apps and for general purpose programming, with a great community. You can be productive in it very very quickly. I may be biased, but I find Rails and Ruby conventions still more intuitive and less surprising than Django, especially when onboarding new people.

Thanks for the insight. I’ll start looking into it more.

Keep in mind opportunity cost. In the average city across the world, I'd say that the order in which you get a job as a developer is:

1. Javascript.

2. Java.

3. Python.

4. C#.

5. C/C++.

I'm also weighing each of the against the difficulty of learning the language and the ecosystem.

Ruby could be nice but I doubt it breaks top 10 anymore. Your mileage may vary.

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

#176

Post by berkes »

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.

1. Start writing software -greenfield-. "Wow this framework is really neat".

2. Grow it over years. Maintain it. "This language/framework/architecture really sucks"

3. We should rewrite it in Rust. Goto 1.

The real problem is that architecture is hard. Maintainance is difficult, scope creap a thing and accumulating technical debt will kill you eventually.

In Rails, getting a Proof of Concept "blog" out there, is done in hours. But all the "shortcuts" like "throw in Devise for auth" will get back to you in future, turning "hours of rapid development" into "months of stagnation". Getting a basis that will survive pivots, quick market changes, scope creep and allow to tackle technical debt when time is right, takes years of experience with not just Rails, but with "software architecture" in general.

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

#177

Post by joelbluminator »

berkes wrote: post #176
joelbluminator wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. Start writing software -greenfield-. "Wow this framework is really neat". 2. Grow it over years. Maintain it. "This language/framework/architecture really sucks" 3. We should rewrite it in Rust. Goto 1. The real problem is that architecture is hard. Maintainance is difficult, scope creap a thing and accumulating technical debt will kill you eventually. In Rails, getting a Proof of Concept "blog" out there, is done…

Yes, no argument there. Growing projects is plain hard, no matter what language/framework you use. People talk so much about stack choices as if that's where the problem/solution lies. It's more about building effective teams, respecting seniority, not churning out your employees, having good product people (e.g knowing what to build). That's way more important to most businesses than the endless chat about graphql/react/rails/node/php. But as techies, we tend to view every problem as a technical problem that can be solved by throwing more graphql at it...

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

#178

Post by jordinl »

up_and_up wrote: post #62
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 tons of Ruby jobs: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?tl=ruby&sort=p https://hnhiring.com/technologies/ruby

Also check out https://hnhiring.com/trends

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

#180

Post by _hhff »

When I found this as a ~15 year old I had farmer parents who were pushing me away from computer based careers because they didn’t want me to “waste my life in front of a box”. I had done some C++ coding small adventure games but programming then still felt really cold and academic.

When I found Why’s book, I loved it. I thought it was funny, dark and moving. It wasn’t about programming, Ruby was a sidecar to this person expressing themself in an incredibly vibrant way. I felt like: wow, there are people like me in programming, too!

Now I run a 30 person product shop in NYC. I may have never learnt to code if not for Why.

Post reply on HN