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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Ruby is a joy to use and relatively close to Smalltalk in many many ways.

I wish Ruby had taken Python's spot. When Rails exploded ~2006, I thought it'd become a mainstream language. But sadly it has never been very popular for non-web things, if we exclude Japan.

One reason is probably that the standard Ruby implementation (MRI) was really slow till recently. Smalltalk, on the other hand, had extremely good VMs that served as embryo for the JVM.

I've used Ruby for many big projects (but never used Rails!) and it has scaled really well for large and exotic things such as abstract interpreters.

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Speaking of Ruby, there is this book that I read a few years ago (five years ago, in fact – time flies), that was using Ruby when explaining the things it was talking about.

Personally I don’t use Ruby and prefer Python instead, but the book was very enjoyable nonetheless so I would recommend that book to anyone, even to people like me who don’t really like Ruby in general and don’t really want to read or write Ruby in general.

Stuart, T., 2013. Understanding Computation: From Simple Machines To Impossible Programs. O’Reilly.

Book website: https://computationbook.com/

This books looks super interesting. Did you find any of it applicable to particular problems you are working on or was it good general knowledge?

As good general knowledge yes

Another good "non-rails" Ruby book is "Enterprise Integration with Ruby"[0]. Unfortunately, it's a bit dated (2006), so I am sure some of what Schmidt details is no longer supported/valid. Still, a cool book IMHO.

0 - https://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Integration-Ruby-Maik-Schm...

I didn't give Ruby a second thought after hearing Matz say something along the lines of being a bit sad that people were using it because it meant that he couldn't change it anymore. It was his toy language that escaped his control and now he had to worry about compatability and couldn't just break things. It's not a good sign when the creator didn't want it to be used that much.

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