Ruby Isn't Fun Anymore | Hacker News Reader

Ruby Isn't Fun Anymore

adam.blog.heroku.com

39 pointsqhoxie32 comments

Ruby is stabilizing, but it's stabilizing in a bad way. It's establishing itself as a language for people who throw tantrums, claim they would never hire a person who does not use a mac, and whose cat-fighting would put cats to shame.

Python, on the other hand, is establishing itself as a serious tool for serious programmers. Python developers don't get calls from crazy teenagers and blog about it.

People like that are swimming in a pond, and they are holding such long discussions about the state of the water in the pond, that they don't notice the rivers, lakes and oceans around them.

I would still not bet any money on Ruby.

It seems a lot more likely to me that it's stabilising as a language whose users are absurdly stereotyped in the manner you've just done.

It's somewhat hard not to stereotype them when the loudest among them behave like ill-behaved 8 year-old children.

I know there is a lot of very serious people using Ruby (and Rails), but the community that builds businesses around the technology needs to deliver a message to the kids: that they should behave or their toys will be taken away.

No, respectfully, it is not hard. You simply have to grow up.

It's somewhat hard not to stereotype them when the loudest among them behave like ill-behaved 8 year-old children.

Tell me what langauge you use so I can irrationally avoid it.

I use Python most of the time I have to program. For the past months, my working tools have been Outlook, Project, Word and Excel, so, my impact on the art of programming is negligible. On occasion, I have been seen coding in C, C++, C#, Java, Forth, Perl, PHP, Dataflex (on Unix), Mantis (on IBM/370s - I miss the 3278 terminals), several different BASIC implementations (back all the way to Apple IIs and Sinclair ZX series), various flavors of SQL and even Bash when the need arises. During my higher education, I used FORTRAN several times. I learned OOP on Smalltalk and made some simple programs in Actor (a ALGOL-ish language very much inspired by Smalltalk).

Feel free to avoid any language you want. The point I was making is that I have no energy to deal with childish behavior of toxic community leaders and their abandoned minions. Life is too short and my to-do list is way too long. :-)

I am not saying I will not use Ruby or Rails - it's a very nice stack. But, most certainly, I will not invest much time contributing to it unless the rest of the community sheds away its more toxic members.

My samples are all based on recent ruby community users blog posts.

It's sad to think that you draw generalizations from the people with the loudest voices.

It might be sad, but I don't blame him. The signal-to-noise ratio for Python related material is higher than for Ruby in my experience.

It's funny that the reputations used to be reversed; that the Python community was insular and unfriendly to newcomers, and the Ruby community was welcoming and helpful.

What you can clearly see between the tenors of the two communities is that there is more surface-level drama in the Ruby community.

What that has to do with anything professional, I have no idea. I read Ruby blog posts and mailing list entries, but I don't write them; I write code (and here) instead.

Python has a community?

Python might not have as many bloggers as a hip language like Ruby, but by community I mean people contributing to open source python projects, writing papers that use python, etc.

Pray that I don't start drawing conclusions about Python users based on your post.

I have not written anything major in Python. DHH and Zed both have.

Oddly enough, Zed Shaw has been a Python programmer for at least the last year or more, which undermines your second paragraph a bit...

I haven't found this to be the case at all. Who besides Zed is behaving this way?

Move along, nothing to see here... Seriously... This is just some random blog entry about how Ruby isn't fun anymore because it's no longer a cool-kids-only thing. "Now it's just what we do for a living." Blah, blah, blah... Spare me the whining.

Did people vote this thing up without reading it just because it's about Ruby or is there something particularly significant and worthwhile about this post?

It's possible that some of us are looking through the headlines, and saving them for reading at a later time.

The fact that the story gets voted up is a consequence of this, perhaps.

Very good point.

Well, the author is a YC alumnus who runs a cloud-based RoR hosting service... not saying that this means we HN'ers should upvote on the basis of appeal to authority.

He's not whining but saying "it's the start of a new era". Read the full article not just the first paragraph.

No whining in the article I read. Which one did you read?

I was thinking something similar: if "not fun" means "Ruby is becoming a stable, documented, performant language that can be used for real work" then I, for one, welcome our new adult overlords.

(Of course, there's still a long way to go until those criteria are satisfied, so I suppose it's still somewhat fun. Maybe not dance-around-naked-with-a-lampshade-on-your-head fun, but then, Zed's moved on...)

I guess it wouldn't be fun anymore if you got your fun from being seen as edgy, feeling like you're subversive, or from your chatting it up with other developers about it.

But if you got your fun from playing around with the language itself, exploring its nooks and crannies, and bring what you learned to other languages, there's no end to what fun you can have.

_why re-discovered adding and removing mixins from digging around the late Guy's archives, and implemented it as mixico http://hackety.org/2008/10/06/mixingOurWayOutOfInstanceEval....

And hell, this guy implemented fizzbuzz using C++ metaprogramming. http://web.telia.com/~u43518104/articles/fizzbuzz.htm

Ruby has a very long way to go before it is the "status quo".

All of this 'meta' language talk is tiresome. Just build something and talk about that, please.

Don't tell the Ruby folks this -- but a lot of us still have a lot of fun with Perl. I also enjoy Common Lisp.

Just like the adage, "you can write bad code in any langauge", well, you can bore yourself to death in any language, as well. If you are doing boring things, your programming langauge choice isn't going to magically make something fun. (The opposite isn't true, though. If you pick Java or PHP for your project, you won't have much time for having fun.)

But don't worry, there will always be a new language for the fanbois to latch on to. This week, it's Clojure. (And for the record, I like Clojure. It's just hard to read anything about Lisp and not hear 138 Clojure fanbois talk about "OMG ITS THE JVM!!1", and that is pretty annoying. Blog posters should be required to install the language and write "hello world" before they start advocating it.)

I just tried patting myself on the back too. Wow, that felt wonderful.

Well then, maybe Clojure or Arc can get some of that new relationship energy. They need it more than Ruby does. I'll still be writing Ruby though.

I thought the post would touch on the drama and politics that have come up in the past year. I'm relatively new to ruby (~2 years) - and this might just be a community thing that every language eco-system cycles through...

But regardless, I think that ruby has a while before it loses steam. It's inherently a fun language

I think this is true. Part of the fun of Ruby a few years ago was "sneaking it in" in a particular environment and having people wonder where you found the time to develop all of these new utilities you were using.

I don't understand this at all. Not saying it's wrong. Just saying that I don't seem to be wired this way.

What I find fun about ruby is that, for better or worse, the language makes it convenient to express programs in a way that is very close to how I naturally think about them. Also: it's got pretty good libraries and a good community.

I would've found this blog post worth reading if the author would've explained why the shift from upstart to accepted technology means that for people like him ruby is no longer fun.

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