Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I wonder whether the increasing popularity of Ruby for web development has created pressure for Ruby to compromise its original philosophy.

I don't think it has. The original philosophies, as much as they exist, oriented around ease of use, programmer happiness, and pure OO - things Rubyists still enjoy. But Ruby has missed the boat on being a popular, general programming language in the way Python is big time. Most Ruby jobs are related to building Rails apps in some way or another and the majority of the Ruby ecosystem (in the West, at least) orients around Web development (and not gaming, scientific programming, education, or the many niches Python has found a home in).

Ruby is an interesting language and one that's worth learning and using IMHO, but in the West, Ruby has become "typecast" as a life support system for Rails essentially. (Before people note the non-Rails things they're doing with Ruby, I said most Ruby jobs and the majority of the Ruby ecosystem. Reporting on Ruby developments has been much of my job for the last 6 years but I am more than happy to be swayed :-))

I'm curious though, what was the uptake on Ruby before Rails?

I wasn't aware of Python/Ruby back in those times, but my impression now is Python was widely used prior to Rails existence... in academia, science, mathematics, etc, but Ruby was not much on the map until Rails came along.

I'm not saying this is how is was - I honestly don't know, just my impression as someone fairly new to this stuff. I would appreciate if someone who was familiar with the Ruby community prior to Rails could shed some light on this. Doing some google searches turns up minimal clues. The wikipedia on Ruby says "Around 2005, interest in the Ruby language surged in tandem with Ruby on Rails, a popular web application framework written in Ruby. Rails is frequently credited with making Ruby "famous""

While I wouldn't quite recommend the TIOBE index in general, it's still useful for attempts to identify significant events in the history of a language's popularity. Here's its historical graph for Ruby:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html

According to this, Ruby really exploded in 2006 after holding steady for quite some time in relative obscurity. Now you just need to figure out when Rails became hugely popular to check for a correspondence.

I believe it was this presentation in November 2005: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

I'm curious though, what was the uptake on Ruby before Rails?

Prior to 2005, reasonable in Japan and poor in the West. Analogous to the position of Erlang, say, in 2012.

The influx of new users and attention after 2005 could have turned into a more mainstream success for the language and for years, I thought it would pan out, but I'm not sure it has.

> But Ruby has missed the boat on being a popular, general programming language in the way Python is big time.

Why do you think this is? My biggest hurdles were documentation quality, frequently flaky Windows compatibility (not necessarily in core, but definitely in a ton of gems), and figuring out to deal with the volatile nature of many gems (New Ruby versions are awesome! Monkey patching is awesome! API compatibility between versions is lame).

It seems like it's almost a cultural issue.

I originally avoided Ruby, back at the beginning of Rails's popularity, simply because Matz admitted it was slow and he had no intention of making it faster. It has improved now of course, but I still have something lurking in the back of my mind that says Python is faster than Ruby.

Documentation is a huge thing. I found the docs difficult to navigate, and only in the last few months (whenever the latest change was) are they easier to navigate. But the descriptions are still pretty spartan and it's hard to find what function your looking for if you don't know what it's called. The way names are chosen doesn't match with my experience from other languages (Java, C, PHP, Scheme). So I tend to use Stack Overflow a lot more than the Ruby docs themselves.

A good book helps get past the hurdles of knowing what function to use for what. However, the only real examples in the Ruby books I've read are in Rails books. So that might be part of the cultural issue jamesgeck refers to. Poor docs + book focus on Rails means you can only learn Ruby for the purpose of Rails, and that typecasts it as a web language.

Note that PHP is stuck as a web language even more than Ruby. PHP is meant to be one, of course, but it's still usable as a general systems scripting language. I've written a nightly cronjob billing system in PHP since then the web frontend, which was PHP, and the cron job back end could all share the same billing libraries. I've also written small compilers and other scripts in PHP. That was before I was very comfortable with Python and Ruby (and had most of PHP's standard lib memorized), but PHP still worked fine.

I tend to use Ruby now for most scripts, except where other people require me to use Python, like where some shared team library I need only works with Python. So, there are at least SOME cases where Python is mandatory and not voluntary.

A good book helps get past the hurdles of knowing what function to use for what. However, the only real examples in the Ruby books I've read are in Rails books. So that might be part of the cultural issue jamesgeck refers to. Poor docs + book focus on Rails means you can only learn Ruby for the purpose of Rails

I find that confusing as there are plenty of good Ruby books that aren't Rails focused all the way from beginner to advanced. Maybe they're just not promoted properly, though.

I'm a Ruby developer who never uses Rails, and I think this is a major problem. It makes it hard for me to embrace "Ruby developer" as a career path because that means I'll be typecast as a Rails dev, and I don't want to use Rails.

It's hard enough trying to be a professional male programmer under 50 without being pandered to as a mountain dew swilling minecraft playing hoodie wearing brogrammer, so for sure adding Rails to the mix is just asking to be typecast.

Yeah, I was trying to use some of the mathematics libraries for ruby, and found that we've got a lot of ports of things like NumPy that were created around 2006, and haven't been maintained - and there are multiple half-baked forks floating around trying to keep them running, and so the documentation is wrong.

It's bad enough that I'm just going to switch to Python for this project.

Here in Poland there are two kinds of 'Python' job offers:

- web development, with "knowledge of Django a plus" - a job title without Python in it (Software Tester etc) requiring "a scripting language (Bash/Perl/Python/Ruby)"

Ruby job offers are almost exclusively Rails offers. Ruby is not even widely acknowledged as a scripting language.

So I agree that Ruby's reached an equilibrium at the moment, and is looking for what's next.

I don't discount the possibility that it will break into other niches. The language is a better known quality, but there are still plenty of worlds to conquer.

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