Who's Using Ruby (or Not), for What, and Why?

#1

Post by jc00ke » Mon, Aug 31, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC

Who's Using Ruby (or Not), for What, and Why?
rubini.us

Re: Who's Using Ruby (or Not), for What, and Why?

#2

Post by bronson » Mon, Aug 31, 2015, 7:09 PM UTC

First question: "What is your company name or website?"

Pretty sure that guarantees you'll get watered down answers for the rest of the survey... At least, I'm not comfortable associating my company with Ruby advocacy/disparagement.

Re: Who's Using Ruby (or Not), for What, and Why?

#3

Post by nickpsecurity » Mon, Aug 31, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

I had to choose between PERL, Python, or Ruby. PERL was powerful but try reading others' stuff. Maintenance phase is important. Python was productive, readable, and fast, even for newcomers. Ruby + RAILS particularly were similarly kicking butt. I decided on Python because there's lots of effort pouring into it across the whole field: JIT's/compilers; numerical computing; scripting; web apps; cross-platform sys apps; integration with cutting-edge languages (eg Julia); security tech; cloud runtimes.

That plus its good community, long time existence, low defect rate with static analysis tools (i.e. Coverity), and increasing usage in mission-critical applications (eg Bank of America). Seem like an excellent baseline until something better comes along. Plus, if your writing business code, there's a good chance what you write might stick around for a decade or more. I pity the poor soul that would be reverse engineering Java, C#, etc code to support and extend legacy 10 years from now. Python with decent documentation might be way easier on them, though. :)

Re: Who's Using Ruby (or Not), for What, and Why?

#4

Post by Goladus » Mon, Aug 31, 2015, 7:19 PM UTC

I work in life sciences. I see Ruby used (a lot) for web development and not much else. Lots of Python, R, Perl, and Java as well as native binaries usually written in C and C++.

I see ruby occasionally in system administration and DevOps tooling but apart from puppet and homebrew there's nothing I would recommend to anyone who isn't already interested in going all-in on ruby development.

Re: Who's Using Ruby (or Not), for What, and Why?

#5

Post by jc00ke » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 11:36 PM UTC

bronson wrote: post #2

First question: "What is your company name or website?" Pretty sure that guarantees you'll get watered down answers for the rest of the survey... At least, I'm not comfortable associating my company with Ruby advocacy/disparagement.

We've actually had pretty good responses. You can always say N/A.