Let's talk about Ruby. hat's the status of Ruby these days?
I learned the basics of Ruby back in 2016, but haven't really paid much attention to it then.
Assuming you want to do something web related with it, you'd probably still use Ruby on Rails, but, with all the serverside JS stuff and React/Vue/Angular5 frameworks etc. around, is there even any reason you'd want to use Rails these days?
Assuming you're not doing something web related with Ruby, I mean, what else useful and relevant can you do with it? If you wanted to make a game for fun, you'd probably want to stick with C# or something, and if you just want to do some cool little project thingy (idk rasp pi or something), you'd probably stick with Python right?
I wouldn't call it a dead language yet, but is it dying? Is it worth spending time getting good at it, especially if you want to stick with web related stuff? What's the use case for Ruby now, or is there any?
ruby has come and gone. it's not a new language and only found its way into web dev because DHH hyped the shit out of it. rails is still there, but people are generally moving away from it.
Liam Scott
I'd take ruby over serverside JS any day. Express is a fucking mess, sails is DOA, and there's barely anything else worth using in the JS universe. But when you put ruby up next to something like Elixir, it doesn't have many positives.
The newer versions are getting decently speedy, and the language is still absolutely wonderful to write scripts and small apps in, but for any large app the overhead of things like rails just make it uncomfortable.
I wouldn't say its dead, and you can still get a lot of jobs writing ruby, but its not a dynamo either.
Robert Long
ruby is only good for writing some text/file manipulation scripts that run once or twice, and it does really a good job in that aspect.
It feels natural to process japanese/chinese text, too (unlike python and javascript utf16 stupidity)
Aiden Perry
>Ruby on Rails It's still used. >any reason Because you know it, like any other language
Ruby on Rails is pretty good. For sure better than PHP-based shit. It isn't excessively popular, but it's alive. Pure Ruby - not so sure, but Ruby on Rails is pretty good.
Thomas Collins
Rubyfag here.
RoR is THE reason Ruby is alive and well. Far better than Php/js on backend. It has some cool features and libraries too. Ruby is also second best when it comes to QA automation. If you are not planning to work as QA automation engineer or use ROR, Ruby is, sadly, irrelevant.
Elijah Thompson
Ruby is pure comfy Rails is retarded
Carter Bennett
>t. unemployed NEET dropped out of high school due to clinical autism
Joseph Mitchell
Ruby is a better and more consistently designed language than Python. But that only affects people who really take the time to learn the language at a deep level. If you are the type of person who just uses the docs to learn a language then Python will be easier.
The only part of Python that is better than Ruby is the for-in loop of Python which is so much better than methods that take blocks in Ruby.
Samuel Taylor
It's still used in web backends, and I'd take it any day over python for little projects. Recently wrote an i3status wrapper script in it for my latest rice.
It's a fun language to use, it'll never die.
Gavin Adams
>t. 20 layers of ActiveBullshit to make hello world
Caleb Perez
>"I have no idea what I'm talking about"
Kevin Parker
>and if you just want to do some cool little project thingy (idk rasp pi or something), you'd probably stick with Python right? Eh, Python doesn't really have any major advantages over Ruby for general purpose programming. You can use whatever you prefer.
Nathaniel Martinez
Ruby is comfy af. Second only to Smalltalk in comfy, but actually plays nice with the world without hacky, broken shit. REAL OOP. Decently fast. Consistent. Powerful. The biggest deal with Ruby that makes me really reluctant to use it is GIL, though. :(
Ruby 3x3 will be amazing and I eagerly anticipate it.
Leo Cooper
This. Why don't neets want to admit that JS server-side development is a fucking mess ?
Ryan Hughes
Its not NEETs. Most NEETs hate JS. Its the fucking code-academy hackerschool garbage and social justice bullshit in the bay area that pushes node so fucking hard.
Most of those shit schools are 16 weeks. 16. For your average retarded normie, thats barely enough time to learn to tie their shoes properly, let alone learn programming concepts AND multiple languages. So by letting them crap out JS on the front and backend, they cut the workload they have to do
Jordan Peterson
You don't really appreciate how fucking consistent ruby's OO is until you try to use OO in any other "OO" language.
People hate OO for two reasons: other languages fuck up OO and other people fuck up OO. FP and other paradigms are more rigid in how they work, so you dont get pajeet making 500 classes to describe a shopping cart. But at the end of the day, I find the way ruby abstracts many things superior to many other languages.
You should take a look at Crystal. Its great. Basically ruby syntax, compiles, and is speedy as hell. Still in alpha, and for it to compete with something like go they need Stdlib and to get the statically linked binary size down, but for a language that hasn't had any corporate sponsor, its amazing how far along it is
Jack Harris
Honestly, real OOP and Functional programming feel a lot alike to me. In both cases, the program ends up collapsing down. It's hard to explain exactly what I mean because it's more of a feeling than anything else, but it's there. And that feeling is entirely lost in Java and most other OOP languages. Ruby and Smalltalk are the only OOP languages I feel it in.
It's not all that crazy. LISP has the CLOS, and Elixir's modules can feel quite "OOP"-ey with a recursive loop able to take on the behavior of an object.
Caleb Cooper
I know what you mean by collapsing in on itself. Usually it manifests itself, in ruby, as near method chains, and in elixir as a well done pipeline.
This isn't to say that having 300 method long chains or pipelines is the way to do it, but that good code tends to use few, if any, variables.
Owen Taylor
Availability. Python is on virtually every Linux server. Ruby is not.
Eli Roberts
It minimally better than Python, but not that much that I'd value its survival.
Samuel Morales
It's comes preinstalled on all *important* server bistros, though.
Matthew Russell
i tend to write simple scripts in ruby because I don't want to deal with the retardation that is python. but that's it. all those toy languages are pretty disgusting and for anything serious there are real programming languages one can use.
Wyatt Ross
i would prefer server side js but python is cool too. using ruby gets difficult when you use try to find a database driver or additional frameworks.
Jack Myers
/thread
Anthony Sanchez
I've used Django in the past and really enjoyed it. Is ruby on rails better? I haven't tried flask yet either.
Carson Davis
I don't use Rails, I use Ruby for a lot of things though. Ruby is extremely handy and a dream to use, most people look at it or try to learn it quickly and develop the opinion that it's "stupid" just because they don't understand it yet. Ruby is simple, and straight forward, but it has a few different concepts and does some things differently from other languages (better usually), so it takes some time to really get used to the language. I heavily suggest learning it.
People that have become enlightened by Ruby have brought Ruby's concepts to new places such as by creating new languages such as Crystal and Elixir which try to mimic many of Ruby's concepts and syntax.
Liam Clark
ROR had some nice generating stuff so it would be faster to get stuff done in when comapred with djnago but I think it does to much magic in order to be easy to de bug, I'll stick with python unless I want to do the google summer of code thing this summer
Charles Stewart
>Python is on virtually every Linux server. Ruby is not. Python2, mind you.
Cameron Sanchez
Rails bled Ruby dry and prevented Ruby to establish itself as an general purpose scripting language.
Jeremiah Cruz
It does more stuff for you by itself and thus its easier to get a rails app off the ground faster than django but that's about it, keep in mind I am new at both
Leo Watson
Dead. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it's dead.
>Is it dying It got overtaken by JS back-end meme hype Now Rails and subsequently Ruby is almost entirely forgotten even though it's still the fastest way to build a web application to date. Absolutely nothing close comes to it when it comes to CRUDs.
Also the japs are using it for embedded software and scripting, and not Rails web development.
Ruby3x3 will be come out too late to save it's popularity. Just learn Elixir at this point.
>The only part of Python that is better than Ruby is the for-in loop of Python which is so much better than methods that take blocks in Ruby. >why do use language X? >I really rate their for loop syntax. That's like the most minor fucking thing.
Julian Long
Let me leave this here:
"Ruby is back in the TIOBE index top 10 and now it seems to be for a longer time. If we take a look at the chart of Ruby it follows a very common pattern for programming languages. (..) The language peaked in 2008, but then all hipsters moved to a new language and Ruby dropped to one third of its popularity. It remained there for a long time but is now catching up very slowly. The fact that it is getting more popular so gradually is a good sign. This means that its increase in popularity is structurally instead of being pushed by hypes."
>The only part of Python that is better than Ruby is the for-in loop of Python
..which is also part of the Ruby core matrix.
for a in [1,2,3] puts a*a if a !=2 end
Get over it: Ruby can do literally everything than Python can. Most people don't know that C/C++ bindings are easy as fuck in Ruby. But there are many things you can do in Ruby, but not in Python.
The funny thing is: The closer you look the uglier python gets and the more you realize the beauty of Ruby. You can do many freaking things in Ruby (i.e. continuations like in Scheme) that you will never need, but when you need something, Ruby always delivers.
>Source: >developed in Ruby and Python
Elijah Reyes
I think Perl and Ruby share a lot of common ground. Or to put it like this: Matz simply took the best parts of Perl, Smalltalk and TCL and blended into one god-like langauge.
I'm not even hating I enjoy Perl a lot. But give Ruby a try sometimes, Tim Towtdi is also a friend of us...
Landon Ward
ruby still have many gotchas though:
for example hash.merge return a new hash when set.merge doesn't
Sebastian Gomez
>Rails bled Ruby dry and prevented Ruby to establish itself as an general purpose scripting language. meme that gets spouted in every web programming thread >hey kids, Rails is dead, PHP is making a comeback, JS is gay lol
Parker Stewart
>for example hash.merge return a new hash when set.merge doesn't >hi, Im 5 years old and mommy didnt tell me what a set is yet
Aiden White
Ruby isn't installed by default on RHEL or SUSE, afaik.
Those are the only distro worth mentioning in enterprise environments.
Nathan Hughes
the failure of Python v3 to replace v2 had the unintentional consequence of making Python a 'stable' unchanging, non-breaking dependency much the same way the failure of Perl 6 makes Perl 5 an unchanging language which simplifies things for distro maintainers
Adrian Carter
Originally I started to learn Ruby because of Rails. Nowadays I absolutely love Ruby, but I don't really like Rails anymore. Active Recod is a crutch for someone who likes SQL. JavaScript is too difficult to work with, too much workarounds necessary here. Also similar to Lisp, Ruby makes it too easy to create your own "language" and that's what Rails does too eagerly..
