12 ms·

What I wish a Ruby programmer had told me one year ago..

63 points by Sirupsen 16y ago

nearestneighbor 16y ago
> And then I recommend something like Arch Linux whenever you feel like you are ready for something more advanced! What's so great about Arch? Why should I waste my time getting the basic functionality working, like X or audio?
- compay 16y ago
  I use Arch but I wouldn't necessarily take the author's advice. If you enjoy tinkering and want to learn more about administering a linux machine, Arch is great. But if you want things to "just work" then Ubuntu is also great.
- abentspoon 16y ago
  Less magic. Ubuntu is a complex system, and hard for a beginner to learn and customize. However, there's no need to switch while you're happy with Ubuntu.
  - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
    Agree. I'm a Slackware user because too many times has Ubuntu booted and showed me a dialog box saying "I updated your system and broke everything; have fun fixing it". If I wanted something that constantly breaks things and then try to get off by looking cute, I'd get a puppy. EDIT: s/Slackware/& user/
- Sirupsen 16y ago
  To learn.
  - nearestneighbor 16y ago
    > To learn. Learn what? How to get the basic functionality working? So that when when you are installing Arch, you would know how to do it? Sounds perfectly reasonable, I guess. P.S. I've been using Linux since the '90s. Configured X, etc. a bunch of times. You know what I've learned? That it's stupid when the computer can't do it for you. Not all "learning" is created equal.
    - Sirupsen 16y ago
      Learn how Linux works. Configuring X and audio is a part of that. If one is not interested in doing such things, then Arch or any other similar OS would obviously not be the right choice.
      - nearestneighbor 16y ago
        > Learn how Linux works. If that's your goal, you may be better off learning C or Assembly (since you are coming from PHP)
- johkra 16y ago
  For me, there are three main reasons: * Customizability. It's very easy to build a system just the way I want it. * Rolling release. There are no releases every six months, but when a new version of a software is released, I get it after a short testing period. * Package availability. Everything I need is either in the repositories or easily buildable from AUR. (Using simple recipes called PKGBUILDs). BUT: This is only great, if you know your way around Linux - I can install and configure Arch in less than 2 hours, but my notebook for instance uses the same install for about 2 years now. The good wiki helps to gain this knowledge, but it's still very unfamiliar for most people.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  I enjoy using Arch because it puts me in total control of what's on the system. Also, X and audio really take just a few minutes to set up.
brazzy 16y ago
"Error establishing a database connection"? That's deep wisdom indeed...
- Sirupsen 16y ago
  No idea what happened, trying to fix it currently.
- augustl 16y ago
  Yes, Ruby doesn't scale.
  - Sirupsen 16y ago
    The blog is powered by Wordpress. :D
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
trebor 16y ago
Breaking out of a programming paradigm is difficult, but one of the most liberating things that you can do. Now when you go back to working on PHP projects you can approach it with different methods. The roughest time I had breaking my paradigm was when I learned a little Lisp...
- dagheti 16y ago
  If found working in a ML language like Haskell or F# puts a really tight straight-jacket on code style, and is wonderful at forcing you to adopt a new paradigm. When you go back to coding in other languages, you approach the same problems in different ways because you were forced to solve them in a strongly typed functional manner.
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    Yeah, and after you're comfortable with ML or Haskell, try Prolog. Unification+backtracking is like pattern matching cranked to 12. As a bonus, a lot of the corners of Erlang will suddenly make more sense, and several Prolog implementations come with good libraries for constraint programming. Also, not to nitpick, but Haskell isn't an ML dialect, and while my experience is with OCaml (not SML or F#), OCaml doesn't force you to do anything in a purely functional manner the way Haskell does - it just makes it an option. (I think this is a good thing, but I guess it's a downside when you're trying to force yourself to try new stuff.)
Sirupsen 16y ago
Very sorry about the downtime, wasn't expecting such a rape.
- Sirupsen 16y ago
  Aaand.. it's up!
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
augustl 16y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.sirupsen.dk/me/what-i-wish-a-ruby-programmer-had-told-me-one-year-ago/&hl=en&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... The post in Google's cache, while the site is down.
hvs 16y ago
This is what I've come to expect from articles about Ruby: And of course point them towards Linux: “Windows is not the best development platform in the world for Ruby. I recommend you to try out Linux. Start with a simple distribution, like Ubuntu. And then I recommend something like Arch Linux whenever you feel like you are ready for something more advanced!” Really? In an article about Ruby you feel the need to point people at your personal pet OS? Pointless.
- Mc_Big_G 16y ago
  It's not pointless at all. Trying to develop in Ruby or Rails on Windows in a huge pain in the ass. I know, I did it for a year or so. He could have recommended OS X, but the price is a barrier to entry.
  - rubinelli 16y ago
    I think the biggest problem is the number of gems with native libraries. I switched to JRuby, and felt a lot less pain. Now if only it had a faster startup...
    - kunley 16y ago
      Btw you can try nailgun to start JRuby's JVM once. See your $jruby/tool/nailgun/
      - rubinelli 16y ago
        I looked into it and it's definitely interesting. It's just a pity NetBeans doesn't use it (and given the current situation, probably never will). Anyway, thanks for the tip.
  - dpritchett 16y ago
    Ubuntu on Virtualbox is my preferred method of trying out new languages without worrying about my Windows install holding me back. I blogged a HOWTO on that back in December. The improved flash performance of Ubuntu 10.04 will hopefully be enough to keep me out of Windows entirely from here on.
njharman 16y ago
> After a few days playing around with Python, I felt okay with it. I didn’t love Python, Probably should try longer than a few days, but this is the best/only metric for personal programming language (business/group programming may impose other metrics). If you don't love the language you're programming with, you should find another.
- nearestneighbor 16y ago
  > If you don't love the language you're programming with, you should find another. It's the other way around. If you love a language, you are probably unaware of its flaws or of other languages (It's like the stupidity-confidence correlation). This is one of the reasons fanboys make me want to puke.
  - msie 16y ago
    So you should stick with a language you sorta like? Wouldn't that lead to less mastery of the language and the same result (unawareness of its flaws)?
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    Well, if you love a language enough, you'll eventually be dragged through all of its weak areas and get real perspective. The important thing is just to keep quiet during the "best thing EVER!!!" phase. The reason fanboys are so annoying is the combination of enthusiasm and relatively shallow knowledge.
    - nearestneighbor 16y ago
      > Well, if you love a language enough, you'll eventually be dragged through all of its weak areas and get real perspective. You'll be dragged, but you won't get any perspective if you know only that language.
butterfi 16y ago
Grammer cop says no. Honestly, your choice of words is distracting. Your server got "raped"? PHP is "evil?" What, no Nazis? I'm not sure why this post is getting votes...
- ulvund 16y ago
  Give him a break .. English is not his first language
  - _pius 16y ago
    Honestly though, the "rape" thing was pretty offputting to me. Completely gratuitous and not at all clever.
    - Confusion 16y ago
      He may just be translating a common expression from his native language into English and doesn't realize how forceful it sounds. 'You've completely raped that function' is the literal translation of something I would say to someone that rewrote a function in a bad way. It would be considered to be less offensive than something that would translate as "you fucked it up". It's closer to 'you've completely wrecked that function'.
      - Erwin 16y ago
        Assuming the .dk domain means he's Danish, I can tell you that there's no common Danish expression that would translate to "rape". We're not Vikings anymore. More likely that choice of word comes from online first-person shooter games lingo like "Let's rape the opposing team's base".
- nonrecursive 16y ago
  Was "grammar" intentionally misspelled?
  - epochwolf 16y ago
noxn 16y ago
I bet if this post was about python and not ruby (and maybe leave the Arch Linux part, as people didn't seem to like that), there wouldn't be anyone calling him a fanboi.
- Macha 16y ago
  Nah, attacks happen. It is the internet after all. Post a highly subjective post in favour of anything, and you'll find someone to disagree loudly with you.
  - noxn 16y ago
    Probably. I still have the feeling that it wouldn't get this much bad comments in a python entry.
- noxn 16y ago
  Yay bad karma!
nearestneighbor 16y ago
tl;dr: PHP noob discovers Ruby and OOP. Thinks he's now so awesome that people care about his opinion about unrelated topics like Linux distros.
jorgecastillo 16y ago
It's kind of disappointing to see the hate some HN readers express toward non mainstream Linux distros like Arch. As some readers have pointed out this sort of Linux distros are not for everyone. We can use whatever OS we like for whatever reasons we choose and there is no reason to get angry or offensive about it. P.S. I use OpenBSD.
owyn 16y ago
i think that's a new record. flame war from the first post.

63 points by Sirupsen 16y ago

> And then I recommend something like Arch Linux whenever you feel like you are ready for something more advanced! What's so great about Arch? Why should I waste my time getting the basic functionality working, like X or audio?

compay 16y ago
I use Arch but I wouldn't necessarily take the author's advice. If you enjoy tinkering and want to learn more about administering a linux machine, Arch is great. But if you want things to "just work" then Ubuntu is also great.
abentspoon 16y ago
Less magic. Ubuntu is a complex system, and hard for a beginner to learn and customize. However, there's no need to switch while you're happy with Ubuntu.
- koenigdavidmj 16y ago
  Agree. I'm a Slackware user because too many times has Ubuntu booted and showed me a dialog box saying "I updated your system and broke everything; have fun fixing it". If I wanted something that constantly breaks things and then try to get off by looking cute, I'd get a puppy. EDIT: s/Slackware/& user/
Sirupsen 16y ago
To learn.
- nearestneighbor 16y ago
  > To learn. Learn what? How to get the basic functionality working? So that when when you are installing Arch, you would know how to do it? Sounds perfectly reasonable, I guess. P.S. I've been using Linux since the '90s. Configured X, etc. a bunch of times. You know what I've learned? That it's stupid when the computer can't do it for you. Not all "learning" is created equal.
  - Sirupsen 16y ago
    Learn how Linux works. Configuring X and audio is a part of that. If one is not interested in doing such things, then Arch or any other similar OS would obviously not be the right choice.
    - nearestneighbor 16y ago
      > Learn how Linux works. If that's your goal, you may be better off learning C or Assembly (since you are coming from PHP)
johkra 16y ago
For me, there are three main reasons: * Customizability. It's very easy to build a system just the way I want it. * Rolling release. There are no releases every six months, but when a new version of a software is released, I get it after a short testing period. * Package availability. Everything I need is either in the repositories or easily buildable from AUR. (Using simple recipes called PKGBUILDs). BUT: This is only great, if you know your way around Linux - I can install and configure Arch in less than 2 hours, but my notebook for instance uses the same install for about 2 years now. The good wiki helps to gain this knowledge, but it's still very unfamiliar for most people.
steveklabnik 16y ago
I enjoy using Arch because it puts me in total control of what's on the system. Also, X and audio really take just a few minutes to set up.

brazzy 16y ago

"Error establishing a database connection"? That's deep wisdom indeed...

Sirupsen 16y ago
No idea what happened, trying to fix it currently.
augustl 16y ago
Yes, Ruby doesn't scale.
- Sirupsen 16y ago
  The blog is powered by Wordpress. :D

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

trebor 16y ago

Breaking out of a programming paradigm is difficult, but one of the most liberating things that you can do. Now when you go back to working on PHP projects you can approach it with different methods. The roughest time I had breaking my paradigm was when I learned a little Lisp...

dagheti 16y ago
If found working in a ML language like Haskell or F# puts a really tight straight-jacket on code style, and is wonderful at forcing you to adopt a new paradigm. When you go back to coding in other languages, you approach the same problems in different ways because you were forced to solve them in a strongly typed functional manner.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  Yeah, and after you're comfortable with ML or Haskell, try Prolog. Unification+backtracking is like pattern matching cranked to 12. As a bonus, a lot of the corners of Erlang will suddenly make more sense, and several Prolog implementations come with good libraries for constraint programming. Also, not to nitpick, but Haskell isn't an ML dialect, and while my experience is with OCaml (not SML or F#), OCaml doesn't force you to do anything in a purely functional manner the way Haskell does - it just makes it an option. (I think this is a good thing, but I guess it's a downside when you're trying to force yourself to try new stuff.)

Sirupsen 16y ago

Very sorry about the downtime, wasn't expecting such a rape.

Sirupsen 16y ago
Aaand.. it's up!
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

augustl 16y ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.sirupsen.dk/me/what-i-wish-a-ruby-programmer-had-told-me-one-year-ago/&hl=en&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... The post in Google's cache, while the site is down.

hvs 16y ago

This is what I've come to expect from articles about Ruby: And of course point them towards Linux: “Windows is not the best development platform in the world for Ruby. I recommend you to try out Linux. Start with a simple distribution, like Ubuntu. And then I recommend something like Arch Linux whenever you feel like you are ready for something more advanced!” Really? In an article about Ruby you feel the need to point people at your personal pet OS? Pointless.

Mc_Big_G 16y ago
It's not pointless at all. Trying to develop in Ruby or Rails on Windows in a huge pain in the ass. I know, I did it for a year or so. He could have recommended OS X, but the price is a barrier to entry.
- rubinelli 16y ago
  I think the biggest problem is the number of gems with native libraries. I switched to JRuby, and felt a lot less pain. Now if only it had a faster startup...
  - kunley 16y ago
    Btw you can try nailgun to start JRuby's JVM once. See your $jruby/tool/nailgun/
    - rubinelli 16y ago
      I looked into it and it's definitely interesting. It's just a pity NetBeans doesn't use it (and given the current situation, probably never will). Anyway, thanks for the tip.
- dpritchett 16y ago
  Ubuntu on Virtualbox is my preferred method of trying out new languages without worrying about my Windows install holding me back. I blogged a HOWTO on that back in December. The improved flash performance of Ubuntu 10.04 will hopefully be enough to keep me out of Windows entirely from here on.

njharman 16y ago

> After a few days playing around with Python, I felt okay with it. I didn’t love Python, Probably should try longer than a few days, but this is the best/only metric for personal programming language (business/group programming may impose other metrics). If you don't love the language you're programming with, you should find another.

nearestneighbor 16y ago
> If you don't love the language you're programming with, you should find another. It's the other way around. If you love a language, you are probably unaware of its flaws or of other languages (It's like the stupidity-confidence correlation). This is one of the reasons fanboys make me want to puke.
- msie 16y ago
  So you should stick with a language you sorta like? Wouldn't that lead to less mastery of the language and the same result (unawareness of its flaws)?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  Well, if you love a language enough, you'll eventually be dragged through all of its weak areas and get real perspective. The important thing is just to keep quiet during the "best thing EVER!!!" phase. The reason fanboys are so annoying is the combination of enthusiasm and relatively shallow knowledge.
  - nearestneighbor 16y ago
    > Well, if you love a language enough, you'll eventually be dragged through all of its weak areas and get real perspective. You'll be dragged, but you won't get any perspective if you know only that language.

butterfi 16y ago

Grammer cop says no. Honestly, your choice of words is distracting. Your server got "raped"? PHP is "evil?" What, no Nazis? I'm not sure why this post is getting votes...

ulvund 16y ago
Give him a break .. English is not his first language
- _pius 16y ago
  Honestly though, the "rape" thing was pretty offputting to me. Completely gratuitous and not at all clever.
  - Confusion 16y ago
    He may just be translating a common expression from his native language into English and doesn't realize how forceful it sounds. 'You've completely raped that function' is the literal translation of something I would say to someone that rewrote a function in a bad way. It would be considered to be less offensive than something that would translate as "you fucked it up". It's closer to 'you've completely wrecked that function'.
    - Erwin 16y ago
      Assuming the .dk domain means he's Danish, I can tell you that there's no common Danish expression that would translate to "rape". We're not Vikings anymore. More likely that choice of word comes from online first-person shooter games lingo like "Let's rape the opposing team's base".
nonrecursive 16y ago
Was "grammar" intentionally misspelled?
- epochwolf 16y ago

noxn 16y ago

I bet if this post was about python and not ruby (and maybe leave the Arch Linux part, as people didn't seem to like that), there wouldn't be anyone calling him a fanboi.

Macha 16y ago
Nah, attacks happen. It is the internet after all. Post a highly subjective post in favour of anything, and you'll find someone to disagree loudly with you.
- noxn 16y ago
  Probably. I still have the feeling that it wouldn't get this much bad comments in a python entry.
noxn 16y ago
Yay bad karma!

nearestneighbor 16y ago

tl;dr: PHP noob discovers Ruby and OOP. Thinks he's now so awesome that people care about his opinion about unrelated topics like Linux distros.

jorgecastillo 16y ago

It's kind of disappointing to see the hate some HN readers express toward non mainstream Linux distros like Arch. As some readers have pointed out this sort of Linux distros are not for everyone. We can use whatever OS we like for whatever reasons we choose and there is no reason to get angry or offensive about it. P.S. I use OpenBSD.

owyn 16y ago

i think that's a new record. flame war from the first post.