Saw this gem of a gem on reddit earlier today and there were some trollish comments about no one using ruby anymore blah blah blah which quietly bummed me out. Surprised and Delighted to see it as #1 here on HN tonight!
Don’t let it bum you out.
You'll often see the same names coming back on every post to angrily insist that no one is interested in Ruby
...apart from them obviously because if they didn't they would be busy trolling something else. :P
I don't think so. I mean there are complains about stuff you care about like people complaining about Healthcare. (edit: there are other forms of caring, see my grandchild comment)
Dissing on Ruby is definitely not this, they are not Ruby users wanting Ruby to be better. They don't even know Ruby apart from dissing on it is socially accepted, and makes them feel good.
Surely a one-off comment about nobody using Ruby doesn’t mean you “care”, but if it is true that it is the same people who keep commenting, they obviously care.
Is it because they are jealous of the beauty of Ruby/Rails, as a Rubyist I’d think so, but who is to say really. Maybe they worked at a company where they replaced whatever their favourite stack is with Rails and they have hated Ruby ever since. It could be anything.
You wouldn’t keep responding to stuff you don’t care about at some level.
All in all, I don't think that other forms of caring apply either. I think that parroting "Ruby is dead" doesn't mean that they care about Ruby, it's just a thing people like to parrot, without the meaning realizing in their heads. A form of bonding, a form of distraction, a form of opening to a social interaction, a form of self-reassurance etc. It is lot of things, and caring about Ruby at all is usually not among those (IMO).
I agree. Parroting some meme isn’t caring per se. But I was working under the assumption that the statement that it was the same names who keep doing it. If you say “Ruby is dead” 5 times a year it isn’t necessarily “caring” if it becomes 100 times a year there is something else at play.
In contrast I have also worked on VSCode which is similarly huge but written in Typescript. Faaaar easier to work with, enough that I've been able to contribute a couple of medium sized features and several bug fixes.
So when people say "yeay Ruby" I try to discourage them because I don't want more Ruby code in the world that I might have the misfortune of having to interact with in future.
Now that they use something "far easier to work with", the UX gets to suffer accordingly.
I've never been in a situation where making the customer happy was synonymous with applying best practices to the tech stack or otherwise making it so everyone and their dog can contribute.
It all seems pretty negative value to me though it’s terribly slow.
My experience is that the sort of folks who misuse Ruby's powerful features are the sort of idiotes who dont realise that because a thing can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done. These are the sort of people who are capable of misusing most languages.
I'm having a hard time thinking that ruby is difficult to understand, particularly compared to its opposites lisp, erlang, Haskell, e.g. languages that are extremely simple to the point where the burden of complexity is shoved into code space.
I think so. I'm not an expert but the Gitlab codebase seems like fairly typical Ruby to me.
It is somewhat objectively true:
https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages
https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/GitHub-Octove...
It doesn't mean much, and this library can be reproduced in any of those top 10 languages from what I can tell.
It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.
Of the many developers who used to write Ruby (myself included), I would wager not many of those same people still do.
Keep in mind the number of developers overall is rising rapidly still.
The ratio of people who can code in Python or Ruby to people who can code in Rust or C++ is very high.
It's easy to forget though that number of lines of code required to do something is also a valid metric and Ruby beats Rust on that.
So if you're shipping CRUD web apps that might be a more important metric than say memory usage or CPU time.
Different job, different tool. More people want to ship web apps than write their own JITs.
Engineering is the art of trade offs.
Ruby code can be downright poetic, for better or worse. There's a certain kind of magic to the kind of code it enables. That's not always good, but it _is_ beautiful.
I encourage everybody to read the venerable "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" [1] to see what I'm talking about.
I wish Ruby was cross-platform. It still only works on Windows using the MSYS2 emulation layer, and the only reason as far as I can tell is that it committed hard and early to `fork()` as the main way to use multiple cores.