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> The truth of it is, is that once you've picked up Ruby, nothing feels quite as nice as a scripting glue language. I today agree. Ruby is amazing as a light s

by skewart 10y ago

> The truth of it is, is that once you've picked up Ruby, nothing feels quite as nice as a scripting glue language. I today agree. Ruby is amazing as a light scripting language - heck, I think it's pretty great as an all-around language, but quick glue scripts are where it really shines. I wouldn't be sad to see it fade in popularity if it weren't for the fact that the language(s) and/or ecosystems eclipsing it are so, well, lame. For a profession that demands so much careful, reasoned thought software engineers as a whole can be incredibly irrational.

CGamesPlay 10y ago
> the language(s) and/or ecosystems eclipsing it are so, well, lame. For a profession that demands so much careful, reasoned thought software engineers as a whole can be incredibly irrational. How do you reconcile an unsupported "lame" without being "irrational"? Do you have technical reasons they're lame?
- skewart 10y ago
  Haha, good point. I don't have time to go into much depth right now, but basically the ascendent languages don't seem to offer many compelling technical advantages. For example, I've yet to hear a compelling reason why JS makes a better serverside language than Ruby for most use cases. To be fair, Node and some of the JS libraries for a long time offered advantages over the Ruby ecosystem for things like websockets (EventMachine used to swallow stack traces in a really annoying way). But that has more to do with the ecosystem than the languages themselves. I think part of the problem had to do with how dominant Rails was/is in Ruby. I wish a framework that better catered to emerging app design trends had gotten traction in Rubyland in, say, 2012. As for specific complaints about JS, well, it's a perfectly fine language, but I don't think it's an improvement in any way over Ruby. It has a number of quirks and compromises - prototype inheritance, basically no support for modules, clumsy typing, to name a few - which people have been patching over and working around in lots of different ways over the years. You end up with a forest of different solutions to things that wouldn't have been a problem in other languages. Now some fairly dramatic changes are being introduced, which is probably good, but it means the ecosystem is even more complicated. Working with the JS ecosystem feels like working with a poorly maintained legacy codebase - there are lots of places where people have come up with workarounds to things that shouldn't have been a problem in the first place; it makes you tired just thinking about all the mental energy spent solving all the little unnecessary problems.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I agree. I am happy writing code in Ruby: NLP stuff, Sinatra light weight web apps, and short text handling utilities. I also use Haskell, Java, Common Lisp, and Clojure (and Python for machine learning libraries) but I am happiest working in Ruby.
- igravious 10y ago
  How do you do NLP stuff in Ruby? I thought Python was the go-to dynamic interpreted language for that work what with recent efforts by SpaCy and of course NLTK modules and Sci.py and Num.py ? What do you know that I don't. I'd love to be able to do stylometrics/topic-modelling/part-of-speech analysis/word vectors/… in Ruby -- please show me the way :)
  - mark_l_watson 10y ago
    I have a live demo: http://kbsportal.com http://kbsportal.com Edit: however, stick with Python for deep learning NLP, and NLTK works well and is exceedingly well documented.
    - igravious 10y ago
      Thanks!

by skewart 10y ago

CGamesPlay 10y ago

> the language(s) and/or ecosystems eclipsing it are so, well, lame. For a profession that demands so much careful, reasoned thought software engineers as a whole can be incredibly irrational. How do you reconcile an unsupported "lame" without being "irrational"? Do you have technical reasons they're lame?

skewart 10y ago
Haha, good point. I don't have time to go into much depth right now, but basically the ascendent languages don't seem to offer many compelling technical advantages. For example, I've yet to hear a compelling reason why JS makes a better serverside language than Ruby for most use cases. To be fair, Node and some of the JS libraries for a long time offered advantages over the Ruby ecosystem for things like websockets (EventMachine used to swallow stack traces in a really annoying way). But that has more to do with the ecosystem than the languages themselves. I think part of the problem had to do with how dominant Rails was/is in Ruby. I wish a framework that better catered to emerging app design trends had gotten traction in Rubyland in, say, 2012. As for specific complaints about JS, well, it's a perfectly fine language, but I don't think it's an improvement in any way over Ruby. It has a number of quirks and compromises - prototype inheritance, basically no support for modules, clumsy typing, to name a few - which people have been patching over and working around in lots of different ways over the years. You end up with a forest of different solutions to things that wouldn't have been a problem in other languages. Now some fairly dramatic changes are being introduced, which is probably good, but it means the ecosystem is even more complicated. Working with the JS ecosystem feels like working with a poorly maintained legacy codebase - there are lots of places where people have come up with workarounds to things that shouldn't have been a problem in the first place; it makes you tired just thinking about all the mental energy spent solving all the little unnecessary problems.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I agree. I am happy writing code in Ruby: NLP stuff, Sinatra light weight web apps, and short text handling utilities. I also use Haskell, Java, Common Lisp, and Clojure (and Python for machine learning libraries) but I am happiest working in Ruby.

igravious 10y ago
How do you do NLP stuff in Ruby? I thought Python was the go-to dynamic interpreted language for that work what with recent efforts by SpaCy and of course NLTK modules and Sci.py and Num.py ? What do you know that I don't. I'd love to be able to do stylometrics/topic-modelling/part-of-speech analysis/word vectors/… in Ruby -- please show me the way :)
- mark_l_watson 10y ago
  I have a live demo: http://kbsportal.com http://kbsportal.com Edit: however, stick with Python for deep learning NLP, and NLTK works well and is exceedingly well documented.
  - igravious 10y ago
    Thanks!