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Comment by anonfunction | Hacker News Reader

Ruby isn't cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It's not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago.

This made me happy.

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Jeff is so 1990ish. Cool hipsters do Erlang and Go nowadays!

Future proofed hipsters write in assembly and machine nowadays ;)

Also don't forget Haskell.

Haskell is also rapidly becoming uncool. The cool kids use Coq, Agda or Idris.

Hilariously, there actually is an Agda web framework in development[1], although it seems like more of a research project than a serious effort. If there were a web framework in Coq, that would really be something. Idris is intended to be more general purpose, so hopefully one will be written someday.

For those not in the know, these are programming languages used mostly for developing mathematical proofs. They are all dependently-typed languages, which means that a type can depend on the values it contains. For example, you can constrain a function to only accept lists of a given length in a way that can be type-checked.

1: https://github.com/larrytheliquid/Lemmachine

The vector type is always given as an example, but I find the ability to give a type to printf more mind bending.

Just in case that went over your head and to reiterate, that means that:

    printf "Hello %s" 4

would generate a type error, so would:

    printf "Hello %s" "wor" "ld!"

and:

    printf "Hello %s! %s" "world"

but:

    printf "%s %s!" "Hello" "world"

wouldn't.

...I guess I'll have to stop writing concurrent code now.

Node.js traction is true. As far as I know, Scala newbies are coming back to Java. With Play! and Scooter, Java is more Ruby than Scala. With native compile support Crystal https://github.com/manastech/crystal may soon get all Ruby crowd again.

> As far as I know, Scala newbies are coming back to Java. With Play! and Scooter, Java is more Ruby than Scala.

From what I've seen it's been a one-way street from Java -> Scala. I've yet to meet anyone who wants to go back to Java after Scala. Play! is written in Scala by the way...

> From what I've seen it's been a one-way street from Java -> Scala.

Those users may be core Java developers who don't use any frameworks. If you ask me, Scooter is quite is easy to port any Ruby code easily than any other Scala frameworks out there. Scala adoption is killing Play community (2 times it got forked due to the difference) and that's why they now market it for both Scala and Play. As someone mentioned in Play forum long time ago, Scala is not suitable for team due to its readability. Heck I myself (and our team) used Scala and moved back to Java Play.

Interesting. We find Scala to be more readable than Java. I guess it depends on the type/style of Scala you write. You definitely need be mindful of readability when writing Scala code (code reviews etc. help to ensure readable code). We use Play because it works well with Scala.

Ruby isn't cool anymore? Are startups cool? I think we'd all agree startups are pretty cool.

Going through the HN job postings, my findings are:

Ruby with 6.5 jobs

Python with 4

Java and ObjC each with 2

Node.js and CoffeScript each with 1

Sorry for not sourcing anything, I don't want a massive post. Seems Ruby is still pretty cool. Anyway, this is quite the normal distribution here from my experience. And in the interest of full disclosure -- I am not a Ruby developer.

It's still a long way to go before big enterprisy corporations boring business applications is beeing written in Ruby. As a consultant it's still either Java or .net out there. JavaScript is slowly beeing accepted (you can't avoid it). For hackers Ruby isn't cool, but for consultants Ruby is more than cool enough.

You're seriously happy with all the ,(function(){}){}); verbiage?

That pseudo code in CoffeeScript is essentially "do ->", in respect to being happy with node.js and syntax. CS is getting to be rather popular and when it comes to open source projects, anyone who understands JS pretty much gets CS, especially if they're familiar with Python/Ruby.

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