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Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#31

Post by wmil »

pyrotechnick wrote: post #7

This move marks the beginning of the end of a four year long effort for Twitter to rid themselves of Ruby. History will remember the entire Ruby industry as a series of compounding failures. The de facto formalisation and specifications. The black-box behaviour of core development. The broken-linked, un-versioned docs. The rampant cargo-cult mentality. The arcane exceptions. The meta-frameworks. Gem hell. 1.9/2.0 Rai…

> Gem hell.

Is this really a problem? Every package/dependency manager seems to blow up on occasion. Gems haven't given me the problems that I've had with Pip/CPAN/Autoconf.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#32

Post by SiVal »

What this says to me, a non-RoR user, is that it's harder to build websites with Java than with RoR, but if you pass a certain (very unusual) level of traffic, you'll wish you'd made the extra effort; otherwise, you'll be glad you didn't. (Extra effort isn't free.)

Fine, but what I wish I understood was why RoR is so popular to begin with. The claim is always that Rails is so wonderful that it's worth learning Ruby just to be able to build web apps with Rails. Well, if so, then why isn't there a sequel to RoR: Python on Rails? "The benefit people care most about (Rails, not Ruby) using the language you already know (Python)." Since Python, Perl, and Ruby are so similar except in syntax, and people love the Rails part more than the Ruby part, and so many more people know and love Python, and new Python web app frameworks appear all the time...why isn't one of them Python on Rails after years of Pythonistas being forced to abandon Python and learn Ruby just to be able to use Rails?

Is there some significant difference between Python and Ruby that explains this? What makes Rails so attractive and why isn't the same thing done with Python?

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#33

Post by pyrotechnick »

wmil wrote: post #31
pyrotechnick wrote: post #7

This move marks the beginning of the end of a four year long effort for Twitter to rid themselves of Ruby. History will remember the entire Ruby industry as a series of compounding failures. The de facto formalisation and specifications. The black-box behaviour of core development. The broken-linked, un-versioned docs. The rampant cargo-cult mentality. The arcane exceptions. The meta-frameworks. Gem hell. 1.9/2.0 Rai…

> Gem hell. Is this really a problem? Every package/dependency manager seems to blow up on occasion. Gems haven't given me the problems that I've had with Pip/CPAN/Autoconf.

Hell: not really a problem.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#34

Post by trimbo »

esusatyo wrote: post #26
eta_carinae wrote: post #2

The rumors of Java's death are, indeed, greatly exaggerated.

They used Scala, not Java, on JVM.

They use both.

"Last week, we launched a replacement for our Ruby-on-Rails front-end: a Java server we call Blender. We are pleased to announce that this change has produced a 3x drop in search latencies and will enable us to rapidly iterate on search features in the coming months."

http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/04/twitter-search-is-now...

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#36

Post by jrockway »

scribu wrote: post #27
jrockway wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think I could write a scalable Twitter in mostly Ruby. And I've never written a line of Ruby in my life.

Have you worked on other sites with a similar scale to Twitter? If not, how would you know?

I work at Google :)

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#37

Post by pg »

kevinconroy wrote: post #6

The novice programmer says: "My language is better than yours." The wise programmer says: "Use the right tool for the job." Please HN, we're wiser than trending stories would suggest.

Do you think it's impossible for one language to be better than another?

If so, it's impossible for a language designer to do a good job, because it's impossible to improve a programming language.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#38

Post by hayksaakian »

SiVal wrote: post #32

What this says to me, a non-RoR user, is that it's harder to build websites with Java than with RoR, but if you pass a certain (very unusual) level of traffic, you'll wish you'd made the extra effort; otherwise, you'll be glad you didn't. (Extra effort isn't free.) Fine, but what I wish I understood was why RoR is so popular to begin with. The claim is always that Rails is so wonderful that it's worth learning Ruby j…

Its called Django.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#39

Post by knowtheory »

SiVal wrote: post #32

What this says to me, a non-RoR user, is that it's harder to build websites with Java than with RoR, but if you pass a certain (very unusual) level of traffic, you'll wish you'd made the extra effort; otherwise, you'll be glad you didn't. (Extra effort isn't free.) Fine, but what I wish I understood was why RoR is so popular to begin with. The claim is always that Rails is so wonderful that it's worth learning Ruby j…

Python has a roughly equivalent MVC web framework called Django.

Ruby and Python as languages are not radically different in kind, but their respective developer communities have had different focuses, and as a consequence the library of tools are not identical.

Ruby on Rails became popular because people were dissatisfied with the way that web development was being done, and DHH is very good at marketing/propaganda. Ruby on Rails has had a substantive effect on the way that web development is done, and there have been numerous attempts in other languages (that didn't already have a framework like Django) to recreate the things that Ruby programmers enjoy with Rails (CakePHP and Grails come to mind immediately).

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#40

Post by [deleted] »

SiVal wrote: post #32

What this says to me, a non-RoR user, is that it's harder to build websites with Java than with RoR, but if you pass a certain (very unusual) level of traffic, you'll wish you'd made the extra effort; otherwise, you'll be glad you didn't. (Extra effort isn't free.) Fine, but what I wish I understood was why RoR is so popular to begin with. The claim is always that Rails is so wonderful that it's worth learning Ruby j…

[deleted]
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