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with the existence of Perl6, Clojure, F#, Rust, Go, and few others ... For someone who doesn’t know Ruby, why learn it today?

by systems 11y ago

ihsw 11y ago
It's still one of the most terse and transparent languages around, plus there are tons of jobs for working with it. I quite like Go, Python, TypeScript, etc but Ruby is in a league of its own when it comes to short and sweet. It's a pleasure to write.
jballanc 11y ago
For my money, Ruby comes closest to realizing the "promise" of dynamic languages. That is, it's fast to build with when prototyping, flexible when refactoring, reasonably fast enough and not so memory hungry that it can't handle "web scale". Obviously there are languages that are better in each of these areas, but few that combine so many as well as Ruby. In other words, if you know that you'll be working in a problem domain (e.g. high concurrency) where specific advantages of some other language (e.g. Go/Erlang) are likely to be needed, use that language. If you're just building something, then Ruby's a fine place to start.
cageface 11y ago
The Rails ecosystem is mature now, which means you can find an off-the-shelf gem to do just about anything you want. So building things in Rails is very very fast. It's hard to beat for MVP-style development.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nchelluri 11y ago
if everything came down to just what you type in the editor (e.g. functionally equivalent programs in any language performed the same everywhere), i would always prefer ruby. it's just a nicer language to use than most, or maybe all others.
sandstrom 11y ago
It's got an elegant syntax, great for meta-programming (tends to be useful in large and/or complex applications), strong community (there are gems for almost everything, i.e. no need to reinvent the wheel over and over again). It's used by some interesting applications, such as Github, Shopify, Heroku, Square, Zendesk and AirBnB.
eropple 11y ago
For me: because nothing else approaches it in terms of linguistic flexibility. I learned Ruby about two years ago, after learning...a dozen-ish languages? Something like that. I don't write web applications in it, because Rails grinds my gears for a whole host of reasons, but for my money it is the can-opener language. If I have a problem, I feel like I can generally explore it faster in Ruby (holla, Pry) and build a solution iteratively without really burning a lot of mental effort on it. The second part, aside from Ruby's general applicability and ease of exploration, is that I think Ruby scales, in terms of application design, from that garbage-y first-cut code to really elegant, really clean code that's fun to work in and easy to maintain. That first solution, borne mostly out of dumping my REPL history, may not be great, but that's okay: with the help of the excellent ecosystem around the language I can reify my expectations in tests and swap out the original exploratory system for good, easy-to-work-with code that's clear in its behaviors. Of course you can do that with other languages, too--but I've never found one that makes it as easy to stretch in both directions, from noodling around to code I'd trust with my business (and I'm doing exactly that), other than Ruby. But as for the languages you namedropped: - Perl 6 is great, but it's a decade late and it isn't sufficiently compatible with Perl 5, so it's starting miles and miles behind where Ruby is right now. It's not dead out of the gate, but it keeps lurching toward the green and making everybody nervous. Practically nobody knows Perl 6 now, I don't know why somebody would pick it over Ruby if they're lining both languages up side by side. - Clojure is super interesting and Rich Hickey is a supergenius and we're all lucky he didn't go into supervillaining because I think he'd be really good at it. And Leiningen is an amazing build system. But Clojure suffers from what I view are the usual problems a Lisp has around readability and the hands-on-keyboard experience (and I like Lisp, I've got DrRacket installed on my laptop for a reason, but I've been writing Lisps for a decade or more now and grinding out Clojure code is slow). Love the people, love the community...would rather write Ruby. - Rust doesn't do nearly the same thing as Ruby. They're useful for different things. I feel like Rust inherited the good parts of the Ruby ethos from the participation of folks like Steve Klabnik. Big fan of the language and the community, but it's not incompatible with Ruby where it matters anyway so who cares? - F# is a great language and, like Rust, also has little overlap with what I use Ruby for. If I cared about Ruby for the web, maybe there would be more overlap, but F#-for-web is swimming upstream anyway. (Doable, but harder than C#.) - Go, while it as a language deserves some small credit for introducing co-routines to people who come from Python (he said, only somewhat snarking while he makes Lua gang signs), is close to an unmitigated disaster of an ecosystem that tries to be prescriptive when it should be hands-off and hands-off when it should be prescriptive. It is also a tremendously limited language in terms of syntactic flexibility and ability to do stuff like "second-order" metaprogramming; this is a design decision that can be debated, or could be debated if I hadn't been convinced long ago by better languages that crippling a programmer to make writing an execution environment easier to always be the wrong thing. Do not want.

with the existence of Perl6, Clojure, F#, Rust, Go, and few others ... For someone who doesn’t know Ruby, why learn it today?

by systems 11y ago

with the existence of Perl6, Clojure, F#, Rust, Go, and few others ... For someone who doesn’t know Ruby, why learn it today?

ihsw 11y ago

It's still one of the most terse and transparent languages around, plus there are tons of jobs for working with it. I quite like Go, Python, TypeScript, etc but Ruby is in a league of its own when it comes to short and sweet. It's a pleasure to write.

jballanc 11y ago

For my money, Ruby comes closest to realizing the "promise" of dynamic languages. That is, it's fast to build with when prototyping, flexible when refactoring, reasonably fast enough and not so memory hungry that it can't handle "web scale". Obviously there are languages that are better in each of these areas, but few that combine so many as well as Ruby. In other words, if you know that you'll be working in a problem domain (e.g. high concurrency) where specific advantages of some other language (e.g. Go/Erlang) are likely to be needed, use that language. If you're just building something, then Ruby's a fine place to start.

cageface 11y ago

The Rails ecosystem is mature now, which means you can find an off-the-shelf gem to do just about anything you want. So building things in Rails is very very fast. It's hard to beat for MVP-style development.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nchelluri 11y ago

if everything came down to just what you type in the editor (e.g. functionally equivalent programs in any language performed the same everywhere), i would always prefer ruby. it's just a nicer language to use than most, or maybe all others.

sandstrom 11y ago

It's got an elegant syntax, great for meta-programming (tends to be useful in large and/or complex applications), strong community (there are gems for almost everything, i.e. no need to reinvent the wheel over and over again). It's used by some interesting applications, such as Github, Shopify, Heroku, Square, Zendesk and AirBnB.

eropple 11y ago

For me: because nothing else approaches it in terms of linguistic flexibility. I learned Ruby about two years ago, after learning...a dozen-ish languages? Something like that. I don't write web applications in it, because Rails grinds my gears for a whole host of reasons, but for my money it is the can-opener language. If I have a problem, I feel like I can generally explore it faster in Ruby (holla, Pry) and build a solution iteratively without really burning a lot of mental effort on it. The second part, aside from Ruby's general applicability and ease of exploration, is that I think Ruby scales, in terms of application design, from that garbage-y first-cut code to really elegant, really clean code that's fun to work in and easy to maintain. That first solution, borne mostly out of dumping my REPL history, may not be great, but that's okay: with the help of the excellent ecosystem around the language I can reify my expectations in tests and swap out the original exploratory system for good, easy-to-work-with code that's clear in its behaviors. Of course you can do that with other languages, too--but I've never found one that makes it as easy to stretch in both directions, from noodling around to code I'd trust with my business (and I'm doing exactly that), other than Ruby. But as for the languages you namedropped: - Perl 6 is great, but it's a decade late and it isn't sufficiently compatible with Perl 5, so it's starting miles and miles behind where Ruby is right now. It's not dead out of the gate, but it keeps lurching toward the green and making everybody nervous. Practically nobody knows Perl 6 now, I don't know why somebody would pick it over Ruby if they're lining both languages up side by side. - Clojure is super interesting and Rich Hickey is a supergenius and we're all lucky he didn't go into supervillaining because I think he'd be really good at it. And Leiningen is an amazing build system. But Clojure suffers from what I view are the usual problems a Lisp has around readability and the hands-on-keyboard experience (and I like Lisp, I've got DrRacket installed on my laptop for a reason, but I've been writing Lisps for a decade or more now and grinding out Clojure code is slow). Love the people, love the community...would rather write Ruby. - Rust doesn't do nearly the same thing as Ruby. They're useful for different things. I feel like Rust inherited the good parts of the Ruby ethos from the participation of folks like Steve Klabnik. Big fan of the language and the community, but it's not incompatible with Ruby where it matters anyway so who cares? - F# is a great language and, like Rust, also has little overlap with what I use Ruby for. If I cared about Ruby for the web, maybe there would be more overlap, but F#-for-web is swimming upstream anyway. (Doable, but harder than C#.) - Go, while it as a language deserves some small credit for introducing co-routines to people who come from Python (he said, only somewhat snarking while he makes Lua gang signs), is close to an unmitigated disaster of an ecosystem that tries to be prescriptive when it should be hands-off and hands-off when it should be prescriptive. It is also a tremendously limited language in terms of syntactic flexibility and ability to do stuff like "second-order" metaprogramming; this is a design decision that can be debated, or could be debated if I hadn't been convinced long ago by better languages that crippling a programmer to make writing an execution environment easier to always be the wrong thing. Do not want.