Hacker News Reader

Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

"you should be as worried about finding competent Rails hackers as you should be about finding competent Python/Django hackers."

It's not finding the coders that's hard (any smart coder can pick up Ruby quickly); it's the quality of the code that any new person will inherit. My experience is that the syntactical looseness of Ruby leads to write-only code. Lots of people complain about the readability of Perl, but Ruby is really only nominally better. In Python, readable code is the rule, not the exception.

View on HN

"any smart coder can pick up Ruby quickly"

True, but can they pick up ruby quickly, and rails (rails is non trivial these days), and rspec, and rake, etc. I'm guessing it would take at least 6 months to become merely comfortable with all of these. This is far different than having a proficient coder walk in the door.

You'll have much better luck getting a proficient rails coder than a proficient django coder. On the flip side I'm starting to get a lot of rails candidates that aren't really interested in rails, but used it at their previous job. For while if someone had rails on their resume it meant they took the time to learn it on their own (which is a good sign). Those days are gone.

I'd be really worried if I hired someone that took 6 months to become comfortable with the ruby/rails (and rspec, rake, capistrano, etc). Now it might take way longer than 6 months to fully master everything, but if you already have a good quality code base to learn from and a team of experts any smart developer should have no problem picking things up quickly.

You're missing my point: finding a good Blub coder, however hard, is a constant-time problem. The polynomial-time problem is maintaining/reading/understanding an established code base in Blub.

If Blub is an order of magnitude more difficult to maintain/read/understand than Foo, then even if it's far more difficult to find a Foo coder today, it makes more sense for me to use Foo for my new project.

I think code maintainability has less to do with the language than with the architecture chosen by the developers.

Try to explore (save alone, maintain) a complex Python application like Plone with its multiple inheritance. And then read the code of a modern MVC Rails application. You'll see what I mean.

And your statement that Ruby is only marginally more readable than Perl is very surprising. Ruby is a vast improvement in terms of clarity over Perl and is on par with Python there.

the idea that ruby is a blub language while python is a foo language is laughable. Python has it's issues as well. New style classes vs old style classes. These types are treated differently than those types in terms of default behaviour. Decorators are not the easiest thing in the world to read. Metaclasses are another example.

In my opinion ruby's syntax is simpler from a users point of view and equally as powerful. This may be my bias, but a fair assessment is that they are fairly equal

Speaking from experience: I coded many thousands lines of Ruby code for my startup all alone. Then we raised seed, and hired a few additional developers. Two of them joined my project and took over the development from me. They're both very experienced programmers, but had no prior Ruby experience. It took them less than a month to become productive. Srsly. In short, if you write good code and bring in good developers, Ruby probably isn't going to be a problem.

"True, but can they pick up ruby quickly, and rails (rails is non trivial these days), and rspec, and rake, etc."

2 Weeks for Ruby & Rails. 1 to 2 weeks for Rspec & rake... especially if you're learning using Peepcode videos and a real project. Those numbers are from personal experience. Your learning curve may vary.

This is simply personal preference; I have no problem reading Ruby code. Perhaps this is because I spent a very, very long time with Perl, but other Ruby hackers seem to feel the same way. On the contrary, I don't much care for looking at Python code, because half of it seems to consist of the word 'self'.

So, 'readability' in this case isn't a very valid argument, because anyone who codes in language X is going to find X to be highly readable.

"This is simply personal preference"

Well, yeah. That's why I said it was my experience.

I think the point is, I code in Ruby and in Perl, and my opinion is that neither language is particularly readable or maintainable. Meanwhile, I have less experience with Python than either Perl or Ruby, yet I find it to be a consistently readable language.

Those are all opinions, but they're informed opinions (and I'm not simply advocating for the language with which I am most familiar).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com