montblanc

> How does having cheap access to internet makes the quality of your life better

Whoa that's a bit of a reach no? How about the ability to drive around with GPS? Or stay easily in touch with family living far away? Taking photos of your baby and having it stored on the cloud for free? The ability to learn almost anything for free?

I'm not saying it's all great, it isn't, but we can't deny the benefits.

> most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s

  > I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment.

In terms of mental health, job security, stability (e.g marriage/divorce rates) they may very well be worse off.

I don't know that that's the big issue with dyanmicism, at least not for me. In Ruby the main thing that bugs me once in a few months is a silly typo - calling a misspelled ivar or method. It happens maybe once in half a year but it's still humbling when it happens. It's rare because usually your IDE is very good in spotting these mistakes - even in Ruby, and also decently tested code should break right away. But I do wish and hope the tools will become better - whether it's Rubocop or something completely new, that the chance of this happening will be almost zero. It's not there.

That doesn't mean much. He came from Rails and then switched direction to a functional, Erlang based new language. The historical "initial traction" also doesn't mean much. The two languages aren't similar at all.

What for? I know nothing about it but why not Python? Still haven't heard of anyone using it where I live.

> But yeah, I've absolutely been consulting for more than one company whose primary product was thin models, gargantuan controllers, and no service abstraction to speak of.

I don't get why this is still happening. It's kinda common wisdom now to not let your controllers get fat. I"m not saying that fat models are great but as a community we kinda agree that most business logic stuff is easier tested on the model/service and should be placed there. CTO's/team leaders have to be real sloppy to let teams build code as you describe At the same time - being a consultant, don't you more often than not see codebases in bad state? I mean those are the ones that usually need consulting. So maybe you have an overly negative view on how Rails projects usually look.

Ah yes my bad, confusing names.

I partly agree with what you're saying but still - you're exaggerating. Doing Rails without a decent knowledge in Ruby is exactly what you said - it's being a junior. You'll rely on the existing codebase without any ability to provide your own ideas, only shifting code from here to there without fully understanding what you're doing and will always need a senior whenever things go awry. That's what being a junior is like in any language.

I don't think we can compare languages based solely on the experience of juniors. I'm not saying it's irrelevant, it is, but it's only a part of what writing software is. In the end of the day you need the seniors and people who really get it to maintain the code and steer the ship in the right direction.

But I do agree that Rails is a kind of dialect of Ruby and that you can get pretty far with Rails without being great in Ruby (you still need to be decent though, no way of getting around that).

> Most Rails programmers I've worked with live in the controller and the view

Where is the business logic at? They also write services or something similar or stick it in the Model. Whatever isn't ActiveRecord will be pure Ruby - Rails has no opinions there.

> E.g. quite recently a scraper, wrote it in Ruby -obviously-, found out that we couldn't get performance acceptable, rewrote it in python

How is Python gonna improve performance when writing a scraper, it's mostly about doing a bunch of network requests right? You could do threading in Ruby you know. Both Python and Ruby have a VM lock (GIL, have no idea what it's called in Python).

Python is good choice for scraping due to the many ready made libraries but I don't get how performance was a win over Ruby.

Node is a different story, V8 (and competing JS engines) had huge effort poured into them by Google/Microsoft so it's fast. Python never had that kind of investment afaik. We will see if Shopify can narrow the gap between Ruby and JS, I know it's a reach but they already improved Ruby performance around 25-30% since the project started (about a year?). I am optimstic the performance gap will narrow since what makes JS faster is a JIT. There is no magic here, only effort and investment which costs money.

> But most Rails programmers write Rails, not Ruby

You're really exaggerating.

> you think companies are choosing to write their entire stack in python just because ml tools are in python?

Going with the masses (e.g Java/Node/Python) is the easy thing to do. It feels "safe". But who knows where Python/Node will be 10 years from now, people are restless and will come up with new things (Deno?) and it could be they will start declining. Java is pretty much unavoidable though.

Old Angular wasn't such a bad framework actually...

That Ruby performance is horrible. Also - it's constantly changing. What was true last year might not be true next year. Source - https://speed.yjit.org/

I'll give you surface syntax in common, other than that not much. I think a Rails dev would have a much easier time picking up Django or Laravel than Phoenix. How hard is the switch from Rails to Django? Probably trivial. But Ruby to Elixir is a mind shift.

> JS does make sense given it's what you're using in the client.

Well JS is forced upon us on the browser and not everyone is tremendously happy about it. It has improved, but still. Plenty of folks out there will seek other languages, we will never all fully agree on what's good on the backend.

BTW - are we positive JS will have a monopoly on browsers 5-10 years from now? (I'm talking about WebAssembly). Cos if the monopoly is gone JS will die a violent death I think.

Getting to that scale on the side is a nice problem to have. Maybe it shouldn't be on the side anymore.

A lot of engineers take great pride in improving performance even if it's mostly meaningless to the company. The users don't really care if the number of instances went down from 30 to 20. It is what it is, engineers will be engineers.

Elixir and Ruby have nothing in common as languages and ecosystems, I really don't get why the 2 keep being brought up together. Oh I do get it - whenever someone mentions Ruby some Elixir user will say - hey have u tried Elixir?

Will JS/Node become further fragmented by Typescript/Deno? That could make it a bit nasty to build with JS.

Compared to static languages (with the exception of JS) yes. Compared to Python/PHP? I don't think so.

> Despite me writing off Ruby as a career path for the last five or six years (and I stand by that)

I don't think you need to write it off, especially if you're a consultant. That's just bad business thinking, knowing Ruby is a hot asset.

What have you built lately in Python/Node that "the libraries, documentation, education and off-the-shelve solutions are far, far better and move available." ?

I'm not saying those use cases don't exist at all, but I don't think it's as common as you're making it up to be. As a Ruby dev the last 8 years I didn't have many times when some key functionality was only available in Python/Node. I can see it happening in web crawling or data science but those aren't common to every day web development.

Ok the Tiobe => Fortran is complete horse shit and we all know it. Fortan and Perl are both more popular than Go in that ranking I mean come on. But sure I agree Ruby is a nichey language, usage-wise about the same as Swift/Scala or maybe even Go. Somewhere in the top 10-15 I'd guess. If you look at web backend languages (e.g remove C/Visual Basic/C++) Ruby is probably top 10.

Juniors have a hard time getting jobs period, I don't think it has anything to do with Ruby.

Stay tuned about performance, the Ruby JIT being built by Shopify is gonna narrow the gap. It's now 25-30% faster than CRuby , we'll see in a year how faster it gets. Source: https://speed.yjit.org/

They will figure out monolith Rails makes a lot of sense eventually. Or maybe I'm wrong who knows.

Yes, funny.

> So, Elixir isn’t just a functional Ruby. It’s more like a functional Ruby running on a custom-built operating system that we can design and control from the very language itself to create self-healing applications.

I get that this was a huge novelty when Erlang first showed up. But with today's deployment methods(kubernetes) doesn't every common web stack get the same self healing / auto scaling benefits? Your average devops people are now mostly doing Kubernetes , it could actually slow down their productivity for them to relearn everything in Erlang/Elixir. I basically don't see the big deal anymore (other than perhaps less memory overhead with Elixir) but maybe I'm missing something.

I have a problem with the demonization of Israel going on.

I dont really give a crap about NSO.