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Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

The author of Stanza language has this insightful article on the viability of a programming language for creating a powerful framework like Ruby on Rails [1]. Surprisingly there's no Go and Java equivalent, either it's the incompetence of the programming languages (can't) or the programmers (won't), or both.

[1] Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead:

http://lbstanza.org/purpose_of_programming_languages.html

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I've had to do some maintenance on Rails apps in the past, coming from my Java background, and it was painful as hell. It's just what you're familiar with. I can take my Java and Spring Boot, both of which I'm very familiar with, and write an article like that to wonder why Ruby has not something awesome like Spring Boot. But I don't do that, because it'd be equally embarrassing. Spring Boot for me is super productive, has a lot of batteries included, and is a dream to work with, hence I have no desire to play with Rails. Had I stumbled into Rails development, as a career path, I'm sure it'd talk about this the opposite way.

OTOH, Java almost made me quit and choose a different career. I’ll work with anything but Java. I’ve worked with Python, JS, Ruby, and Go, and I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid working with OO languages. To each their own.

Python and Ruby are both OO.

No. The basis is OO and but they are multi-paradigm. Go has structs, methods, and type embedding but they don’t make it an OO language.

No, it is absolutely not “what you’re familiar with”. Is there a “spring” command that generates controller + view + test for you? That does migrations? Can you say “install spring” and get everything you need to start without stitching dozens of scattered spring artifacts? I’m not even going to talk about one of the most verbose languages out there locked into OOP, made dynamic with thousands of annotations and held together by a DI framework.

Spring is an industrial factory that is good for huge teams, because it acts as a straight jacket.

You're embarrassing yourself as much as the article I was responding to by speaking in these absolutes. I have no doubt you worked on a ("huge") team that made all the wrong choices around Spring, or something like that, and by no means will I claim that OO is the best paradigm, though Java has adopted enough from other paradigms to give you at least some alternatives ways todo things. And I have worked in my share of dysfunctional projects, but I'm currently working on a small team that is highly productive with Spring Boot, and we wouldn't want it any other way.

I’ve literally pointed out real issues that you have to slog through when you start with Spring.

There are plenty of Spring Boot starter dependencies that you can pull in to do some of the things you're mentioning. Can you say "install spring"? Yeah, I think so, there's the Initializer that comes in different modalities. Migrations, you ask? Not sure what kind, but Flyway or Liquibase are some popular dependencies, which are natively supported by Spring Boot. Again, it's all a breeze, as I'm sure Rails is too.

I get that there are poor workplaces making Spring applications a hellscape, and some of those folks escape to go do (let's say) Rails. Others may decide that Java and Spring are fundamentally fine, but need to be used in better ways and then they do so, we're not all idiots (not suggesting that you said so).

My point was that Rails and Spring prioritize different things. And while you can end up with roughly equal result with both, the path can be drastically different. Never wanted to suggest that whoever uses Spring over Rails is an idiot and vice versa. Cheers.

It's Ruby that makes Rails what it is. Matz combined the best of Smalltalk, Lisp and Perl to produce a language second to none for writing DSLs. DHH simply capitalised on Ruby's strengths.

Do you use stanza?

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