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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

Why would anybody want to learn Ruby over say... node.js/Typescript these days?

Well, Rails is still the fastest way to build and iterate a web app that I know of... BY FAR.

I volunteer to teach an intro to Rails class to folks getting ready to graduate a local code school and always enjoy watching their facial expressions as I live demo in about 15 min what they just spend the last couple months learning how to implement in the node/JS stack.

Plus, Ruby is just a joy to work with. Hard to put a price on enjoying the language and framework you work with.

The magic of opinionated and reasonable defaults.

When Node Js is taught people often teach Express framework. If someone teaches AdonisJs, it will have similar effect on audience as mentioned above.

AdonisJs actually does look interesting.

As a side point though, it is much less mature than rails.

Just going off the age, and number of: commits/releases/contributors.

Its GitHub pulse is also obviously not as “rapid”

Rails also has a rich set of libraries in the form of gems - which AdonisJs most likely doesn’t rival

Rails is also used/has been used in production by some major companies. Perhaps AdonisJs has been too, but it can’t be as many

There is also Nest.js (which is Typescript based and also comes with an OEM,etc.).

Nest has a bit more mindshare right now - with Triplebyte, etc using them

https://nestjs.com

The good part is that it uses Express under the hood (which probably is ending up becoming the Rack of JavaScript middleware) ...so you get the third party ecosystem compatibility.

I found this post a good overview of Ruby in 2019:

https://naturaily.com/blog/who-gives-f-about-rails

PHP is the fastest at whipping something up. Not a fan, but it’s fast.

Same reason as you'd learn any language: job market (some areas have more openings for one language (for instance, in Houston, Ruby is slightly ahead of Node, and C# blows both of them away) or another or you need to work with projects written in that language (in the Ruby example, say you want to write a module for Metasploit or hack on Gitlab), etc. It's never as simple as focusing only on what the coolest web language is.

i've always thought of Ruby as a very clean, elegant, ergonomic language to write tools in (based on a few months of experience working with it a few years ago).

I'm familiar enough with JS that i would primarily use JS now for web stuff, but Ruby is quite a nice language to use, and I wouldn't be surprised if its easier for beginners to learn than JS.

In any case I think that skills in any one of the popular 'big' higher level dynamically typed languages (Ruby, JS, Python) are fairly transferable to the others too.

I remember people suggesting I learn javascript when I first started out. I found the syntax of ruby way easier to understand in those early days, and found ways to actually build stuff when I didn’t really know what I was doing. Now I sort of miss ruby (while writing node/typescript all day everyday).

I agree. Mainly done PHP and Nodejs and lately helping on a ruby project but I like how it's more fun when other languages feel more tight.

I feel too bad that Python had taken over the position of Ruby more or less.

Ruby is a beautifully designed language and that makes it worth learning on its own.

It depends on the use case? Are you assuming everything is a web front-end?

I believe your question would be more poignant if you s/node\.js\/Typescript/python/ . There's a lot more overlap between the use cases for Ruby and Python. Just saying.

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