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Where does Ruby go from here?

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Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#61

Post by scottefein12 »

bam365 wrote: post #58

The Happiness Manifesto? Happiness-driven developers? Enough, already. This is an interesting time for computer programming and computer science in general. We're witnessing the coming of age of a very important profession. We owe it to ourselves to advance this profession by developing a body of knowledge based on scientific, mathematical, and engineering principles, as well as empirical observation of what has work…

We're talking about a community where some of the brightest minds already don't come from a traditional background. Several well-known Rubyists have degrees in Theatre and Music. The community is where all the value is-that's where the innovation is coming from. People build products, so culture is essential.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#62

Post by saidajigumi »

kybernetyk wrote: post #33
FraaJad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy that coined the word in the 1950s used the word in a negative sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology

I must admit I never read the school book definition of the word - so yeah, maybe I'm not understanding meritocracy. To me it means: The words/opinion of person with the most expertise on a certain topic should have the most weight in a discussion/decision. In that sense I don't care about gender, skin color, religion, etc. as long as the person knows what he/she is talking about. So I don't see how it would be oppos…

> "The words/opinion of person with the most expertise"

That's oligarchy, or a hair's breadth away, rather than a recent ideal of meritocracy. The problem is that it's all too easy for the "smart people" to become the ones who just run the show without consideration for others' ideas on their merit. That is, "meritocracy" as applied to individuals vs. their ideas can rapidly result in very different things. And it's not always so easy to distinguish between the two in the moment.

Part of the problem is that over the past few years, we're beginning to learn that our collective sense of who our experts are, who we do/don't listen to, is broken. Even those who would self-describe as being very meritocratic easily end up having massive blind spots based on gender, etc. So the bit about "inclusiveness, diversity, and respect" hits to the community trend towards efforts to acknowledge and deal with these problems.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#63

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

bam365 wrote: post #58

The Happiness Manifesto? Happiness-driven developers? Enough, already. This is an interesting time for computer programming and computer science in general. We're witnessing the coming of age of a very important profession. We owe it to ourselves to advance this profession by developing a body of knowledge based on scientific, mathematical, and engineering principles, as well as empirical observation of what has work…

Has there been a time in the last 50 years that your paragraph wouldn't have been just as appropriate? Why is today, September 4th 2014, special?

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#64

Post by chimeracoder »

eik3_de wrote: post #3

> But we have technology needs that aren’t going to always be well served by Ruby What are some examples? I'll start with heavy number crunching (Go/C) and browser-based apps (JS)

> I'll start with heavy number crunching (Go/C) and browser-based apps (JS)

Be careful to distinguish between the language and a particular implementation or runtime environment.

Go, for example, runs perfectly well in the browser[0] except for channels (which are very difficult to implement reliably given the Javascript concurrency model).

If Google decided to allow Go as a language for manipulating the DOM in Chrome, there's no reason that it couldn't serve this role equally well. (This is what Google has done with Dart, so they're unlikely to do it with Go, but this is simply illustrative).

[0] https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#65

Post by lobster_johnson »

Pxtl wrote: post #21
JonnieCache wrote: post #11

I don't want to leave ruby, but at the end of the day, it's slow. Jruby is pretty decent, but the clunkiness of the JVM takes the fun out of it. Maybe it's just the lack of a corporation pouring billions into it like google did with V8, but I suspect that ruby can never be fast, due to ObjectSpace and the like. That awesome/insane object model we all like so much is just impossible to optimise. All the other weird sh…

Now I'm starting to wonder if it would be possible to adapt V8 directly to use other dynamically-typed scripting language, like the Parrot project was intended to do. A language parser at the front, V8 in the middle, and the language's standard library in the back. Node.js demonstrated the power of V8 with an alternate stdlib, perhaps an alternate language in front is possible too? Then again, probably V8 is at the v…

Apple's FTL [1] is probably a better way to go. It's a high-level, general-purpose JIT for LLVM that is being used by Apple's own JavaScriptCore in WebKit. There was a discussion about it on HN a while back [2]

Last I checked, V8 was highly JS-specific, and you would have to rip out and replace large parts of it.

[1] https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/FTLJIT | https://www.webkit.org/blog/3362/introducing-the-webkit-ftl-... | http://blog.llvm.org/2014/07/ftl-webkits-llvm-based-jit.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740925

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#66

Post by mahmoudimus »

eik3_de wrote: post #3

> But we have technology needs that aren’t going to always be well served by Ruby What are some examples? I'll start with heavy number crunching (Go/C) and browser-based apps (JS)

I understand the Go hype, but what kind of "heavy number crunching" have you traditionally done with Go?

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#67

Post by jiggy2011 »

tmorton wrote: post #38
angersock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really nice feel-good list, but it also doesn't make a lot of sense in several cases: "We value open-source frameworks and libraries over developing for popular ecosystems." Most popular ecosystems nowadays are all open-source frameworks and libraries? Unless you're talking about Windows or Mac OSX, I guess? "We value inclusiveness, diversity, and respect over pure meritocracy." These are not mutually exclus…

I think this comment shows exactly what I was getting at. If no one disagrees, the happiness manifesto will die in a sea of nods and shrugs. :) > I'd rather have really good code, even if written by a racist or sexist, than bad code (period). That's a perfectly valid choice. In some cases, it's a completely correct choice. But that's not the tradeoff that I want to make. Take a look at the original Agile Manifesto: h…

Doesn't that depend upon the project? What if I want to build for the App Store audience? Should I be shunned by the "community".

I don't like the idea of associating political views with technologies.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#68

Post by bam365 »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #63
bam365 wrote: post #58

The Happiness Manifesto? Happiness-driven developers? Enough, already. This is an interesting time for computer programming and computer science in general. We're witnessing the coming of age of a very important profession. We owe it to ourselves to advance this profession by developing a body of knowledge based on scientific, mathematical, and engineering principles, as well as empirical observation of what has work…

Has there been a time in the last 50 years that your paragraph wouldn't have been just as appropriate? Why is today, September 4th 2014, special?

No, there really hasn't. And it's a little embarrassing. Lawyers, doctors, carpenters, electricians, engineers, etc. don't feel the need to produce countless rhetorical manifestos. I'm not sure why our profession (or craft, or whatever you want to call it) has to come with so much cultural baggage, especially when there are so many real problems left to be solved.

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#69

Post by lolpep8 »

tmorton wrote: post #38
angersock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really nice feel-good list, but it also doesn't make a lot of sense in several cases: "We value open-source frameworks and libraries over developing for popular ecosystems." Most popular ecosystems nowadays are all open-source frameworks and libraries? Unless you're talking about Windows or Mac OSX, I guess? "We value inclusiveness, diversity, and respect over pure meritocracy." These are not mutually exclus…

I think this comment shows exactly what I was getting at. If no one disagrees, the happiness manifesto will die in a sea of nods and shrugs. :) > I'd rather have really good code, even if written by a racist or sexist, than bad code (period). That's a perfectly valid choice. In some cases, it's a completely correct choice. But that's not the tradeoff that I want to make. Take a look at the original Agile Manifesto: h…

Can we use this as an excuse to drop Node.js, please?

After all, Javascript was created by a homophobe. We should use a more minorities-friendly language and not encourage the use of problematic technologies made by bigots.

Edit: also, someone claimed that a lead maintainer of the Linux kernel is a rape apologist. That's good enough to drop Linux, right?

Re: Where does Ruby go from here?

#70

Post by tmorton »

scottefein12 wrote: post #10
tmorton wrote: post #5

I think this is a great idea. The ruby community is a wonderful thing, and part of that is reflected in the technology. However, the original Agile Manifesto was powerful because it made tradeoffs. "We value X over Y", even when Y is a valuable thing. For this HDD thing to take off, it has to make the similar tradeoffs explicit. For example: We value readable code over runtime performance. We value open-source framew…

I think that's a great idea-want to start us off with a pull request? :)

Done! https://github.com/scottefein/the-happiness-manifesto/pull/7
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