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Rewriting the Ruby parser

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Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#21

Post by runjake »

toolz wrote: post #16
lagniappe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

Are you suggesting php and JS are stealing from what would've otherwise been ruby projects? I've been a ruby dev for a decade and I've never heard of a ruby shop migrating to using php for new work and maybe one or two moving to JS for new work. It's golang and elixir that are taking the place of ruby for new work in my experience. I suspect some python too, but I haven't seen that.

I think they're suggesting that neo-PHP and JS adopted the best parts and patterns of Rails (eg. Laravel).

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#24

Post by riffraff »

noelwelsh wrote: post #3

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

stripe seemed to be doing quite a few interesting things (e.g. Sorbet, and there was some work adopting TUF for rubygems IIRC) but it seems to have dialled down things a bit.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#25

Post by lagniappe »

arp242 wrote: post #18
lagniappe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times. Based on that, it seems the reports of Ruby's decline are not as bad as sometimes claimed. If you look at PostgreSQL then a lot of dev work comes from EnterpriseDB and a handful of companies too. The thing with Rails is that it doesn't scale terrible well to "Twitter scale" (if I'm not mistaken Twitter has dro…

> Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times.

This furthers the point. By stating a lot of companies are looking for Ruby (something that doesn't match my experience when looking) is not a testament that it is hot and in-demand, it is a testament that those roles are not being filled. Senior devs don't make senior dev money doing junior dev work. My assertion is that the majority of Rails is CRUD development that only gets difficult when you step off the golden path- ergo, those positions go unfilled and outnumber their statistical representation in what would be called 'production Rails applications'

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#26

Post by e4m2 »

Interestingly, the actual syntax tree and related structures/functions are generated from the config.yml file and the templates inside the bin directory. They are using a custom template language written in Ruby, here's an example of how they do enum stringification: https://github.com/ruby/yarp/blob/main/bin/templates/src/tok.... Obviously this isn't a novel idea, but IMO this kind of design goes a long way to support their maintainability argument, especially in C.

Also,

> CRuby actually ships with 90 encodings (as of 3.3)

This is asinine.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#28

Post by clairity »

brightball wrote: post #17
noelwelsh wrote: post #3

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

I don't know why, there are tons of smaller companies using it. I have a lot of languages and experience on my resume and the one that consistently gets me the most inquiries at the highest pay grades is still Ruby. Anecdotal I know, but from the moment that it appeared on my resume in 2012 it's been non-stop. Probably 80% of everything I hear about. Ruby and it's ecosystem brings the closest thing to natural Aspect…

i think if rails continues to push hotwire (turbo + stimulus, and perhaps strada?) and get a coherent story on view components, it will continue to take mindshare from the js hype of the last decade. mobile dev is in decline, and browser makers just released web notifications, web app support, webtransport, page transitions, etc., so the backend has largely reached parity for cross-platform development. no longer is json the natural data exchange medium for apps, but rather chucks of html that can be plopped right into the dom without js having to massage the response into shape on the frontend. js can return to being a frontend scripting language, its natural habitat, rather than being shoehorned into being a do-it-all platform language.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#29

Post by arp242 »

lagniappe wrote: post #25
arp242 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times. Based on that, it seems the reports of Ruby's decline are not as bad as sometimes claimed. If you look at PostgreSQL then a lot of dev work comes from EnterpriseDB and a handful of companies too. The thing with Rails is that it doesn't scale terrible well to "Twitter scale" (if I'm not mistaken Twitter has dro…

> Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times. This furthers the point. By stating a lot of companies are looking for Ruby (something that doesn't match my experience when looking) is not a testament that it is hot and in-demand, it is a testament that those roles are not being filled. Senior devs don't make senior dev money doing junior dev work. My ass…

What does "hot and in-demand" even mean, exactly? All I'm saying is that based on my (admittedly limited and vague) dataset there seem to be plenty of companies happily running on Ruby (some with Rails, some without) and that "FAANG-type companies we all heard of aren't using it that much any more" doesn't actually mean all that much.

I'm not really sure what your point about senior/junior devs or "roles are not being filled" is.

(aside: please don't delete your post and post exactly the same identical post again to clear the downvotes on it).

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#30

Post by abhibeckert »

lagniappe wrote: post #8
noelwelsh wrote: post #3

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

Admittedly I haven't written any ruby code in a very long time, but you only briefly touched on the reason we ran away from it after giving it a serious try:

> rails devs pay the bills with other tech or by maintaining legacy rails apps

That "maintaining legacy rails apps" job just doesn't exist with our PHP apps. Once properly tested and deployed PHP will generally work perfectly and smoothly for years with zero maintenance unless someone finds a bug that was missed in testing. You can pretty much setup a cron job to apply security patches and that's it. Maintenance done.

The only downtime I can recall was when our datacenter installed buggy firmware on their storage array and brought down every virtual machine we had with them... which was a pretty rare and unusual event (by the time they fixed it, we had already moved everything to another datacenter... and it seems we weren't alone because they went bankrupt).

With ruby that wasn't our experience at all. We found our production code would regularly just stop working and resources had to be pulled off other tasks with zero notice to figure out why/fix the issue. It was a productivity nightmare. Maybe that's improved now, but from reading the Shopify and GitHub blog posts they both seem to be taking on mammoth amounts of work to ensure their systems are reliable.

At the companies I work for (more than one) we expect anyone qualified to do work like that to be dedicating all of their time to other things. All of the apps we built in ruby were rewritten from scratch in PHP and we haven't had any regrets.

I've never really liked PHP and I actively hate JavaScript, but I've come to accept those two languages are just more practical than anything else. I'm definitely keeping an eye out for that to change though - Swift is look promising for example.

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