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Comment by kunley | Hacker News Reader

Actually a lot of Ruby's features were like: Perl, but with REPL and objects and easy metaprogramming.

I believe Matz intended Ruby to please admins, not only programmers, from the very beginning. Following this, me and few buddies used it mainly for admin tasks for over a decade, doing things somewhat orthogonal to the then-emerging RoR crowd.

Although ofc the author is right about Perl's unbeatable ubiquity..

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Ruby has taken over Perl as my preferred language for small fun projects that I don't intend to update very often. The syntax is more flexible, the libraries are more convenient, and the language just feels more fun overall. It used to be that Perl came pre-installed while Ruby is not, but these days Ruby is fairly available across the systems that I use.

Much of the fun was due to influence from Yusuke Endoh:

https://github.com/mame

mame's stuff is crazy - in a quite positive way ;) +1

Indeed, Ruby is often called "the bad parts of Perl." Ruby made metaprogramming and monkeypatching first class, and somehow made the language even harder to statically analyze.

But there is sorbet, claiming to be very fast and effective.

Honestly I don't know how it behaves in practice - still on my list to check.

Over the years I more use Go where I used Ruby - for a single feature of delivering a single no-deps binary to the server / container where it's supposed to do something.

But I still love Ruby for exploratory stuff.

And I see there was a lot of progress with the VM - one of my favorite side activities is to disassemble the opcodes for trivial and non-trivial sources... (doing same in Python, actually..)

[Looks like I just answered to several different commenters at once ;)]

I remember being shocked to see someone using Ruby for all their systems scripting back in the 2010s. But it made a lot of sense.

Rails definitely sucked up a lot of the use case attention.

(Personally for simple admin scripting work, I tend to use ABS-lang.org and turn on Ruby syntax highlighting...)

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