112 karma · joined February 15, 2009
In this small example we lost a lot of the safety, but for a larger library I'm hoping you could still keep most of the safety of Rust and just expose a smaller subsection of "unsafe" code.
This whole article is BS. At what point in history has labour reaped most of the benefits of any industry?
My thoughts are the same as yours... Ruby and/or Rails aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Just think, Rails powers the site that stores most startups code. It may not be as shiny and new as it was, but there's still a lot of usage.
Edit: And I didn't think to add "for free" to the original blog post.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/169446/Screen%20Shot%202011-12-15%20... http://dl.dropbox.com/u/169446/Screen%20Shot%202011-12-15%20...
I've gotten a few friends to use it, and some encouragement to turn it into a pay-for app.
What does HN think?
Not to mention PHP only really started making an attempt at OOP with PHP 5, and Ruby was designed from the onset to be OOP. Everything in Ruby is an object, so you can do some really neat stuff like 1.to_s to turn an Integer into a String. Add Ruby's cleanliness and readability to the mix, and it's a standout winner over PHP.
That being said, I would recommend you learn Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.1. The community is great, the framework is amazing, and there are a lot of resources freely available, like Railscasts, to help you along your way.
I would stay away from PHP and Java.
I would figure out which language is best suited toward your startup, and learn that, instead of trying to figure out what language is best, then trying to make your startup fit that language.