Live data from Hacker News

Is Ruby Dying?

jmoses.co

31–40 of 159 posts

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#32
post #28
post #4

You just may not be used to Ruby not having the exciting fire of initial hype. That is dead. But that's good. Languages can't live like that forever. Sooner or later they need to stop the wild experimenting, find some best practices and things that work, and settle down and ram home the things that work. Ruby has entered final maturity. It will be in that phase until such time as it really does die, which could well…

I think Perl has already reached the state where it's mostly used in legacy code, at least for web development.

What about Catalyst? Or Mojolicious? Or Dancer? If it's just used in legacy code, why are there still healthy frameworks being produced (granted, these aren't as popular as Rails, but, Perl on the web is hardly in legacy mode)?

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#35

First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project. Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important, new kid in town be damned. Second off, number of package releases doesn't tell much about maturity of packages, developer involvement, or anything. Ruby's a mature language. It's quite feasible, and arguably desirable, for package releases t…

> Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important

That's the most overstated claim in programming. LESS is the "right tool for the job" when the job is styling web pages. Ruby is a general purpose programming language, the jobs it is good for is everything not covered by DSLs like LESS, the same as all other general purpose languages.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#37
post #35

First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project. Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important, new kid in town be damned. Second off, number of package releases doesn't tell much about maturity of packages, developer involvement, or anything. Ruby's a mature language. It's quite feasible, and arguably desirable, for package releases t…

> Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important That's the most overstated claim in programming. LESS is the "right tool for the job" when the job is styling web pages. Ruby is a general purpose programming language, the jobs it is good for is everything not covered by DSLs like LESS, the same as all other general purpose languages.

Not true. Ruby is great for a lot of stuff, but a very poor choice for e.g. scientific computing (scipy/numpy are a far better choice than the very immature sciruby), and plenty of other use cases where there are other "general purpose languages" that are far more suited to certain problems.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#38

I didn't start using Ruby (or Rails) until this year. The language is nice and makes my top 3 language list. That said, I find both Python/Django and Node.js both more productive than Rails for quickly building API-driven web-apps. More so this has to do with Rails, which has a number of warts and a tendency to require excessive configuration for all its pretty much patently false 'convention over configuration' spie…

> Ruby will be the new PHP

It's already the new PHP. If someone starts as a nerd, they gravitate toward other languages (Go, Perl, Python); if they're an art student, it's Ruby.

I'm not a hipster, but I develop all my web pages in 6502 assembly.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#39
post #32
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Perl has already reached the state where it's mostly used in legacy code, at least for web development.

What about Catalyst? Or Mojolicious? Or Dancer? If it's just used in legacy code, why are there still healthy frameworks being produced (granted, these aren't as popular as Rails, but, Perl on the web is hardly in legacy mode)?

I personally haven't seen any new code being written in Perl during either my time in England or in the Bay Area. I don't really see a reason to use Perl when there are languages like Python and Ruby out there with easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though).
Post reply on HN