51–60 of 179 posts
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…
It's interesting that when it comes time to scale to serve enormous loads, you have to be willing to change fundamental parts of your stack which you've made a huge investment in. Ruby holds up well enough on the majority of the sites that use it, but when you have traffic the size that Twitter does, it's just not good enough. And it turns out that Java provides a nice tradeoff with high performance and high-level co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also worth rebutting douchebag trolling with the Ruby community's actual merits. The Ruby community, really really cares about developer tooling and teaching others. Ruby is also one of the nice places where object oriented programming touches metaprogramming. Don't forget that a lot of sysadmin work is done in Ruby now. Both Puppet and Chef are written in Ruby, and that Github and Heroku both came up out of the…
argumentum ad novitam
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.
The "no free lunch" theorem would indicate to me that there is no ultimate language, merely languages that are better for common (to you) use cases.
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…
I'm not a Ruby developer, but I still can't help thinking, "WTF". No technology stack is perfect, but I've yet to meet a stack that was pure evil. There may be some cargo-cult personalities in the Ruby community, but, if there is, it's only because there is value in it. An infinitesimal number of sites have to deal with Twitter's scale problems. The rest can work on getting crap done instead of worrying about Maserat…
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…
I call bullshit. This doesn't spell the end of anything. Ruby isn't the right tool for the job and hasn't been at Twitter for a while. This is old news. Ruby has a place in a lot of other scenarios.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
argumentum ad novitam
It's time to pack up and go home if you are going to straw man Github and Heroku as being popular merely because they are novelties or fads.
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.
So I think the (even just sometimes) discussion of "good language" should be limited to the context of purpose and goal of the said language, which is similar to "choosing the right language for the task".