Ruby 2.4.0-preview1 released

I don't have time to go into much depth right now, but basically the ascendent languages don't seem to offer many compelling technical advantages. For example, I've yet to hear a compelling reason why JS makes a better serverside language than Ruby for most use cases. To be fair, Node and some of the JS libraries for a long time offered advantages over the Ruby ecosystem for things like websockets (EventMachine used to swallow stack traces in a really annoying way). But that has more to do with the ecosystem than the languages themselves.

I think part of the problem had to do with how dominant Rails was/is in Ruby. I wish a framework that better catered to emerging app design trends had gotten traction in Rubyland in, say, 2012.

As for specific complaints about JS, well, it's a perfectly fine language, but I don't think it's an improvement in any way over Ruby. It has a number of quirks and compromises - prototype inheritance, basically no support for modules, clumsy typing, to name a few - which people have been patching over and working around in lots of different ways over the years. You end up with a forest of different solutions to things that wouldn't have been a problem in other languages. Now some fairly dramatic changes are being introduced, which is probably good, but it means the ecosystem is even more complicated. Working with the JS ecosystem feels like working with a poorly maintained legacy codebase - there are lots of places where people have come up with workarounds to things that shouldn't have been a problem in the first place; it makes you tired just thinking about all the mental energy spent solving all the little unnecessary problems.

* Pattern matching: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/pattern-matching.html

* Guard clauses in function definitions: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/case-cond-and-if.html...

* Macros: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/case-cond-and-if.html...

* The |> operator: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/enumerables-and-strea...

For me those really are the killer features for Elixir. I know most people will point to Elixir's support for concurrency and the whole GenServer thing that it gets from Erlang when discussing why Elixir is interesting. And those aspects of the language/ecosystem really are awesome. But being able to nearly eliminate explicit conditionals with guard clauses is just so damn cool I can barely stand it. And the |> operator is something I desperately wish Ruby had. I like Elixir a lot because it seems to put a huge emphasis on making my job as a programmer suck less without sacrificing other things in the process.

At the beginning of my work day, I open Emacs with Cider installed, and start a JVM inside there using Cider (M-x cider-jack-in), and do all my work in the same JVM all day.

Because we make heavy use of immutability, it's easy to completely tear down all our existing namespaces and the single global variable representing the app, reload all namespaces and their functions, recreate a new app instance, and start it. And I bound all this to Cmd-R in Emacs.

So any time I make a change to our web app during development, I just hit Cmd-R and it reloads the entire app in about 0.2 seconds. I don't even notice it, honestly.

This is better than what we used to do, which was to poll the disk for changes to any files, and reload them when they've changed. That was much harder on the disk, and half the time I'm saving, I'm not ready for its code to be reloaded yet anyway.

For tests, we just use Cider's built-in features, which let us either run the tests whose code changed, or all tests, depending on what we want to test.