Hacker News Reader

Comment by coolThingsFirst | Hacker News Reader

Why does Ruby still have this artisinal aura to it, never seen C/C++ For Good gathering.

I can't answer for others, but IMO, Ruby is the most elegant and expressive general purpose programming language that has reached a significant level of maturity and large audience.

If you write Ruby for a few years, and then you "go back" to other languages, you will groan. That's not to say that some other languages do not have things that we wish Ruby had, but often those other things would not really fit well with Ruby.

Nothing is perfect from every angle. But writing Ruby can be a joy for some of us.

There's a huge amount of wonderful people in the community too.

There are. But also.. so much drama. Like soooo much drama

I'm going to edit this: much of this is rails, we know why that is, so apologies to rubyists

I think it's the community. As an outsider watching a friend who is deeply involved with the Ruby ecosystem, I am in awe of the support they get even for small, artisanal-seeming projects from other devs in the community. I've seen them become a better a developer simply by showing up to conferences, talking to other maintainers and participating in the community.

Well, Ruby was designed by Matz who is a native Japanese, so it encompasses lot of the Japanese ideals of perfection and beauty.

It's no accident that it's named after one of the rarest gems in nature. This philosophy of craft and beauty is thus instilled within the community and gets carried forward.

I would not know, but I also do not think that an event xyz in one place at time, reflects all of a community either. So I could not tell you what the people there do; probably they want to socialize. I think creating and maintaining high quality project would be much more important but maybe that's just me. All the main drivers in ruby, have been written ages ago really - rails, _why the lucky stiff, even the old "Learn to program" tutorial from Chris Pine and so forth. That is not to say that no innovation has happened since then, of course, but it seems the peak days are really far, far behind now ...

Ruby is still a great programming language, but it really needs to intensify the effort to get out of the pit-of-decline.

> Ruby is still a great programming language, but it really needs to intensify the effort to get out of the pit-of-decline.

The languages that have supplanted it haven't succeeded by being excellent. If excellence won't do it, what should "Ruby" do?

At this point, we should just appreciate Ruby and move on. In the AI age, other languages are better choices. Ruby is my favorite language, but I build with Go now. Or rather, I guide my minions to build with Go. They write Go better than they would write Ruby (or Python... please die, Python).

Ruby is a great utility language target for LLM-generated tools.

We've gotten to a point now where ultimately there needs to be a very short elevator pitch for any language to gain any traction at all. Anything longer than a sentence, it generally won't go far relatively speaking. It's like a calcification/maturity thing in big sectors of software engineering. You need a VERY good reason to upset an incumbent. "Because we know it/because everyone uses it" is a powerful motivator.

> "Because we know it/because everyone uses it" is a powerful motivator.

It's fundamentally a "we want workers to be interchangeable cogs" motivator; it's a deprofessionalizing move that's against the interests of all programmers per se. Managers can repeat it, but there's no good reason for developers to do anything but resist it where we can.

The other side of this for developers is that the places where "everyone knows X" precludes all non-X options are actually signaling loudly that they don't much value developer autonomy. That's a useful signal worth attending to when applying for jobs.

Elevator pitch for the language itself or a library/library ecosystem that lets you do things better than in other languages. Ruby originally blew up because Rails was a way people enjoyed writing backend code, despite the speed issues. But the problem is other languages got good enough at writing back ends Ruby was no longer special there and didn't have anything else to back it up the way Python has such strong control of the ML library ecosystem.

I wonder if Google was the X factor why Python edged out Ruby.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com