Ruby is not a serious programming language | Hacker News Reader

Ruby is not a serious programming language

wired.com

36 pointsmikece18 comments

So the argument is... "I dont like it", "It's dynamically typed" "Twitter crashed a decade and a half ago", "It's slow", and "It's only in top 20 on the yearly stackoverflow survey"

Do arguments even matter when the article is clearly clickbait? If the title is not enough to identify it as clickbait, the first 4 paragraphs make it clear, with the whole "imprinting" bit.

My first programming language was BASIC. My second programming language was assembly (for Z80A, then for 6502, later for x86). My third programming language, the one the author would call "formative" was Pascal.

None of these languages left me "imprinted" to the point of forever shaping my tastes and making me unable to adapt to or appreciate newer languages.

In fact, if we're talking about formative experiences, I remember one professor at the university who said, quite seriously, that "Anyone who has programmed in BASIC has been damaged for life and will never be a good programmer." The reason why that was a formative experience is that it taught me that people in which we put our trust can be assholes who ruin people's lives because they think some bit of dogmatic bullshit they came up with is clever.

And that's really what the article is about: the author wants to show off how clever they are. I'm okay with that, in general. I remember reading Steve Yegge's blog posts and finding them entertaining, regardless of whether I agreed with them. Thing is, Yegge had a lot more to say than just "look at how clever I am".

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language

Meh, there's no evidence given that Ruby is not a "serious" language, whatever that means.

His major arguments seem to be that he doesn't like ruby's name.

My theory is if the author was in anyway correct in his assertions he wouldn't bother to write hit peices like this. He'd just move on.

The fact that people get stuff done in Ruby and that Ruby is constantly improving acts as a strong counter argument.

I think, ultimately, what is not serious here is the author of TFA. Ruby (and Rails) still work, the ecosystem is still healthy, and their dubious citations of ruby's shortcomings (twitter's fail whale? comparing it to perl?) are just that, dubious.

don’t forget, our dislike of someone’s personality should also weigh here apparently

I don't actually disagree but you could find similar criteria and write a similar piece for the vast majority of "professional" programming languages, including e.g. Python, JS, and C++, so this is kinda silly. "Computing is a pop culture" remains true, and the existence of this article in a magazine like Wired is a perfect example of that.

Absolutely agreed, and this gives me another opportunity to post the wonderful "Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages"

https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...

I kept reading the article (same old regurgitated takes) to the end and wondered where the actual argument against using Ruby was. Is that it?

What a horrific piece of journalism. This reads like something a struggling journalist would put out after a few hours with ChatGPT.

My guess is the first Ruby codebase he worked on was a particularly bad codebase that didn't conform to Ruby standards.

I feel like there used to be a time when wired magazine was worth reading, but I can't even remember when that was at this point.

1995

When was the issue with the embossed white cover with braille text? December 1994? January 1995?

That was peak Wired: techno hippies in Prague, the new year "scared shitlist" (President Dole... President Gates!), TV watches you, General Magic, Ricochet radio modems (the very first wifi), and it still had much more of a "moody b&w" aesthetic than the dayglo nightmare that was to come.

I don't think rewrite the in Scala was great decision, business wise. Fast forward 15 years its way lower on popularity than Ruby. Not sure what they use these days though.

Sincere thanks for reminding me of my Wired subscription. I’d been needing to cancel that.

Right. If I needed a shitty AI generated article I could get that any time from ChatGPT.

Click-bait title for pay-wall spam?

Alternate link: https://archive.is/O7rEl

I mean to criticize Ruby and not mention dependency management (requisite global imports / requires)? You've got a fastball down the middle, but you're swinging at the dirt.

No, let's talk about an N=1 example of performance issues _from 15 years ago_, on version 1 of the language, where I'll bet my house that the biggest issue was poor usage of Rails ORM and architecture and not the Ruby language itself.

Cool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com