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Ruby has always been a jack of all trade, master of none. - It is not the fastest dynamic language like Clojure or LuaJit. - It does not have great C interop

by didibus 10y ago

Ruby has always been a jack of all trade, master of none. - It is not the fastest dynamic language like Clojure or LuaJit. - It does not have great C interop like Python. - It does not have an easily embeddedable runtime as Lua. - It is not the scripting language of all web browsers like JavaScript. - It does not have major big business backing like PHP. - It is not as good as Lisps for meta-programming and DSLs. - It is not amazing at concurrency like Erlang. - It is not the bleeding edge of untyped functional programming like Racket or Clojure. - It does not have every library under the sun like Python. - It is not as great at OOP as Smalltalk So while it's perfectly acceptable at all those things, it doesn't excel at anything. That's why I think it is loosing ground. It does have Ruby on Rails, and that's still arguably the best Web Framework.

MrBra 10y ago
What got Ruby popular (even before Rails) was its expressiveness. Concerning this aspect, I think it's still above the other languages you mentioned. So if you rephrase your sentence like: "jack of all trades, master of one", that is, expressiveness (leading to the "developer first attitude", developer happiness, ecc), then I think it nicely explains why it still represents a valid choice in many situations. If it also gets more solid in some of those areas you mentioned (and it's important to note that the community is focusing exactly on some of those areas: concurrency ("Guilds"), speed ("3x3"), ecc) then it might not only stop loosing momentum, but actually start shining again (note that I said "loosing momentum", not ground: it's easy to loose momentum when you are not a language backed by Google, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're loosing ground...) So, considering all this, why not keep it in consideration as an almost unique (expressiveness-wise) all-around tool, and keep an optimistic mind for what it is coming up with, rather than just tagging it as a falling technology?
- MrBra 10y ago
  Relevant: Ruby 3x3: Matz, Koichi, and Tenderlove on the future of Ruby Performance https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3/ https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3/

by didibus 10y ago

MrBra 10y ago

What got Ruby popular (even before Rails) was its expressiveness. Concerning this aspect, I think it's still above the other languages you mentioned. So if you rephrase your sentence like: "jack of all trades, master of one", that is, expressiveness (leading to the "developer first attitude", developer happiness, ecc), then I think it nicely explains why it still represents a valid choice in many situations. If it also gets more solid in some of those areas you mentioned (and it's important to note that the community is focusing exactly on some of those areas: concurrency ("Guilds"), speed ("3x3"), ecc) then it might not only stop loosing momentum, but actually start shining again (note that I said "loosing momentum", not ground: it's easy to loose momentum when you are not a language backed by Google, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're loosing ground...) So, considering all this, why not keep it in consideration as an almost unique (expressiveness-wise) all-around tool, and keep an optimistic mind for what it is coming up with, rather than just tagging it as a falling technology?

MrBra 10y ago
Relevant: Ruby 3x3: Matz, Koichi, and Tenderlove on the future of Ruby Performance https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3/ https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3/