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Ruby for Good

ti.to

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: Ruby for Good

#51
post #24

The only programming language I know of that is obsessed with trumpeting its own moral virtue. "Matz is nice so we are nice," "Ruby for good," dragging DHH, etc. Meanwhile the Ruby Central and whytheluckystiff debacles show it to be anything but.

_why’s disappearance from the scene was 17 years ago at this point. I don’t think the Ruby community you’re talking about exists anymore.

I wonder what he is up to. I have 2 _why inspired tattoos after he did so much to influence my entire philosophy and style of programming. What a unique character, who happened to pop up at a very formative time for me. Thanks for all the nice stuff and ideas, _why.

Re: Ruby for Good

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ruby is still a great programming language, but it really needs to intensify the effort to get out of the pit-of-decline. The languages that have supplanted it haven't succeeded by being excellent. If excellence won't do it, what should "Ruby" do?

We've gotten to a point now where ultimately there needs to be a very short elevator pitch for any language to gain any traction at all. Anything longer than a sentence, it generally won't go far relatively speaking. It's like a calcification/maturity thing in big sectors of software engineering. You need a VERY good reason to upset an incumbent. "Because we know it/because everyone uses it" is a powerful motivator.

Elevator pitch for the language itself or a library/library ecosystem that lets you do things better than in other languages. Ruby originally blew up because Rails was a way people enjoyed writing backend code, despite the speed issues. But the problem is other languages got good enough at writing back ends Ruby was no longer special there and didn't have anything else to back it up the way Python has such strong control of the ML library ecosystem.

Re: Ruby for Good

#53
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The apparent founder has replied by saying they ‘just updated today with AI’, but the comment seems to have been deleted since. Not sure whether it was supposed to be serious or ironic. Maybe the latter, since the last commit is two months old. Or maybe the repository hasn’t been updated yet.

Yes, I did comment, sorry for the confusion. And the person who made the comment isn't crazy. We have another branch, claude_design, that was deployed briefly for some folks to look at and review and when he looked at the site it was the brief window that it was deployed. On the off chance that you have a better design sense than claude, love feedback/help on the new design -- and a PR ;)

Honestly Claude is not great at front end design. So it’s more than an “off chance”. That being said I think the site looks fine.

Re: Ruby for Good

#54
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The apparent founder has replied by saying they ‘just updated today with AI’, but the comment seems to have been deleted since. Not sure whether it was supposed to be serious or ironic. Maybe the latter, since the last commit is two months old. Or maybe the repository hasn’t been updated yet.

Yes, I did comment, sorry for the confusion. And the person who made the comment isn't crazy. We have another branch, claude_design, that was deployed briefly for some folks to look at and review and when he looked at the site it was the brief window that it was deployed. On the off chance that you have a better design sense than claude, love feedback/help on the new design -- and a PR ;)

Actually looking at it on mobile I see a few issues. Scroll on mobile interferes with the slider. Also some of the font sizes are too large and overflow. Is the source repository public? Or was the request for a PR hyperbole?

Edit: I see it was posted a few comments up.

Re: Ruby for Good

#55
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel for a smallish project I'd rather prefer to have more readable, dense code like Ruby's over the ceremony of static types.

There is almost no ceremony involved in dealing with types in Rust. And what little there is, is worth it ten-fold for all of the runtime bug headaches that you avoid compared to dynamically typed languages.

Specifically addressing the "almost no ceremony" claim and not the "totally worth it" claim:

JS:

  let person_1 = { };
  let person_2 = { parent: person_1 };
  person_1.child = person_2;
Rust:

  use std::cell::Cell;
  struct Person {
      parent: Option>,
      child: Cell>>
  }

  let person_1 = Person {
      parent: None,
      child: Cell::new(None)
  };
    
  let person_2 = Person {
      parent: Some(&person_1),
      child: Cell::new(None)
  };
    
  person_1.child.set(Some(&person_2));
And that's before we start talking about function signatures and traits.

Re: Ruby for Good

#56
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_why’s disappearance from the scene was 17 years ago at this point. I don’t think the Ruby community you’re talking about exists anymore.

I wonder what he is up to. I have 2 _why inspired tattoos after he did so much to influence my entire philosophy and style of programming. What a unique character, who happened to pop up at a very formative time for me. Thanks for all the nice stuff and ideas, _why.

That question pops into my mind from time to time, too. Hope he's well, and I hope he knows the lasting positive impact he had on so many people.

I weirdly got my first programming job / made a good friend because of him (he tweeted about wishing he could adopt @person. I looked up @person, saw they lived in my city, worked at a company that was hiring. I DM'd @person, and eventually got the job!" Thanks ~2008 _why!

Re: Ruby for Good

#57

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

Agentic coding is not a given anywhere.

Re: Ruby for Good

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did comment, sorry for the confusion. And the person who made the comment isn't crazy. We have another branch, claude_design, that was deployed briefly for some folks to look at and review and when he looked at the site it was the brief window that it was deployed. On the off chance that you have a better design sense than claude, love feedback/help on the new design -- and a PR ;)

Honestly Claude is not great at front end design. So it’s more than an “off chance”. That being said I think the site looks fine.

Opus 4.6 and 4.7 can probably come up with something better than most open source contributors, given a few iterations.

We should figure out how to get more designers contributing to open source.

Re: Ruby for Good

#59

Why does Ruby still have this artisinal aura to it, never seen C/C++ For Good gathering.

I would not know, but I also do not think that an event xyz in one place at time, reflects all of a community either. So I could not tell you what the people there do; probably they want to socialize. I think creating and maintaining high quality project would be much more important but maybe that's just me. All the main drivers in ruby, have been written ages ago really - rails, _why the lucky stiff, even the old "L…

[dead]

Re: Ruby for Good

#60
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The apparent founder has replied by saying they ‘just updated today with AI’, but the comment seems to have been deleted since. Not sure whether it was supposed to be serious or ironic. Maybe the latter, since the last commit is two months old. Or maybe the repository hasn’t been updated yet.

Yes, I did comment, sorry for the confusion. And the person who made the comment isn't crazy. We have another branch, claude_design, that was deployed briefly for some folks to look at and review and when he looked at the site it was the brief window that it was deployed. On the off chance that you have a better design sense than claude, love feedback/help on the new design -- and a PR ;)

Please stay off the AI. Leaning hard here sends the opposite message to what you’re intending. Seems the event is trying for say people matter more, lean into that.
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