4 ms·

I'm really surprised to see Ruby so high on the list. I have limited experience with it myself, but I had the impression it was a generally well-liked language

by luhn 9y ago

I'm really surprised to see Ruby so high on the list. I have limited experience with it myself, but I had the impression it was a generally well-liked language.

goatlover 9y ago
Me too, but I have a feeling a lot of that is Rails backlash. I dislike that Ruby is so strongly associated with Rails, because it's a full programming language like Python or Perl in it's own right.
- gaius 9y ago
  Also Chef backlash
bdcravens 9y ago
I think there's a pushback from developers who see Ruby as more hipster and alot of "Ruby" developers as merely Rails developers gluing together gems.
- dummyfunnytoo 9y ago
  I learned Ruby before learning anything about Rails. I've used it off and on professionally for 7 or 8 years for production services, testing, and random glue/batch code. It felt super powerful and refreshing when I was doing C++ daily. And after Perl it seemed like a nice improvement in syntax and readability to me. But... Time has not been kind to my views on Ruby. All that promise turned to ashes in my day to day. All that flexibility and expressiveness led to subjective code reviews and inconsistent styles across files, let alone projects, being worked on by the same team. All that metaprogramming goodness lead to very robust, extendable classes and modules.. that were never extended. They were copy-pasta'd to a new codebase instead because testing the metaprogramming to support both variants was too risky for the project. And once there were two deployed forks no one ever approved time to consolidate them so then the third one was forked... Working with Rails for some internal sites a couple years ago was like my whole Ruby experience in miniature. Started happy and very productive (ahh, generators! I'll just get my boilerplate started.. Rails guides! Actual documentation...) Then it was a little bumpy.. (Ok sure, convention over configuration. But where are the conventions listed? What options are there?).. And then magically working for almost everything. Then I spent three times as much work fixing the last 5% of my issues because they were poorly supported/unusual features, impossible to configure within the default Rails knobs, or basically just growing pains in moving from development to deployment environments. I don't consider Ruby as a hipster language and I formed my opinions of it based on the core language not Rails. Not saying there aren't people who match your description, just offering a different view. I'd summarize it more as Ruby-fatigue. Ruby "in the large" is pretty tedious and working with larger teams has lead to friction (even with good teams trying to be proactive with linting, style guides, code reviews, automation). So I still use it, but it's a "better Perl" for me now. If it's a one file script it's in bash/Perl/Ruby/whatever, if it's a couple files for a utility it's probably in Ruby, but if it's something new and I expect it to be more than that I'll pick something else.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Ruby has some of Perl's problems. One's experience with a language is not merely writing greenfield code on your own. Instead it's maintaining and understanding other people's code, more often than not. If that task is burdensome and frustrating then your feelings towards the language in general will reflect that. Ruby encourages a lot of cowboy coding practices like monkey patching and so forth, which make maintenance a hazard.
scaryclam 9y ago
I think some of the dislike will be misplaced annoyance against rails.
bjz_ 9y ago
I'm one of the new generation of devs to have come into the startup world in Melbourne after Ruby stole its heart, and damn is it a mess and a maintenance nightmare. So many production bugs due to nil pointers, missing methods, etc, and a woeful time to be had if you want to start doing large scale refactors and clean up tech debt. Makes me sad that when faced with Java the generation before me escaped towards Smalltalk and Perl rather than towards ML and Haskell. Thankfully we seem to slowly be turning it around though. If only on the front end, that is - with Typescript, Elm, Flow, Reason, etc. In Melbourne the Rubyists seem to be running towards Elixir hoping it will save them, but having worked on a number of Elixir code bases it seems that while solving some problems it leaves many still standing. :(
- andrew_wc_brown 9y ago
  I've worked on over 40 Rails web-apps in the last 10 years and what I see it lots of apps built by juniors who didn't even bother to read the most basic conventions of the frameworks which result in bizarre behaviour. At least in Rails if you have to refactor you know what it should be refactored to. Frameworks based in other langs have no concrete conventions and this willfully frees developers to write bizarre over engineer web-apps.
- swat535 9y ago
  None of the points you made are specific to ruby. Any language can have technical debt, dangling pointers and so on. I think you might have had the misfortune of running into mismanaged code bases.
  - bjz_ 9y ago
    > Any language can have technical debt, dangling pointers and so on Any language can have tech debt, but I want access to tools in order to help me refactor my way out of that. Working with Ruby feels like building on a foundation of sand with mashed potatoes. It requires a huge amount of discipline to maintain a good enough test suite to combat code rot, and even then, a sufficiently paranoid test suite becomes a hindrance to change (not arguing against tests, just how much extra testing a dynamic lang requires of you if you want to have confidence). You have to refactor incredibly slowly, one small change at a time. Dangling pointers are not an issue in languages like Haskell, and ML. We've had these around for decades. Thankfully most newer languages are banishing them.

by luhn 9y ago

I'm really surprised to see Ruby so high on the list. I have limited experience with it myself, but I had the impression it was a generally well-liked language.

goatlover 9y ago

Me too, but I have a feeling a lot of that is Rails backlash. I dislike that Ruby is so strongly associated with Rails, because it's a full programming language like Python or Perl in it's own right.

gaius 9y ago
Also Chef backlash

bdcravens 9y ago

I think there's a pushback from developers who see Ruby as more hipster and alot of "Ruby" developers as merely Rails developers gluing together gems.

dummyfunnytoo 9y ago
I learned Ruby before learning anything about Rails. I've used it off and on professionally for 7 or 8 years for production services, testing, and random glue/batch code. It felt super powerful and refreshing when I was doing C++ daily. And after Perl it seemed like a nice improvement in syntax and readability to me. But... Time has not been kind to my views on Ruby. All that promise turned to ashes in my day to day. All that flexibility and expressiveness led to subjective code reviews and inconsistent styles across files, let alone projects, being worked on by the same team. All that metaprogramming goodness lead to very robust, extendable classes and modules.. that were never extended. They were copy-pasta'd to a new codebase instead because testing the metaprogramming to support both variants was too risky for the project. And once there were two deployed forks no one ever approved time to consolidate them so then the third one was forked... Working with Rails for some internal sites a couple years ago was like my whole Ruby experience in miniature. Started happy and very productive (ahh, generators! I'll just get my boilerplate started.. Rails guides! Actual documentation...) Then it was a little bumpy.. (Ok sure, convention over configuration. But where are the conventions listed? What options are there?).. And then magically working for almost everything. Then I spent three times as much work fixing the last 5% of my issues because they were poorly supported/unusual features, impossible to configure within the default Rails knobs, or basically just growing pains in moving from development to deployment environments. I don't consider Ruby as a hipster language and I formed my opinions of it based on the core language not Rails. Not saying there aren't people who match your description, just offering a different view. I'd summarize it more as Ruby-fatigue. Ruby "in the large" is pretty tedious and working with larger teams has lead to friction (even with good teams trying to be proactive with linting, style guides, code reviews, automation). So I still use it, but it's a "better Perl" for me now. If it's a one file script it's in bash/Perl/Ruby/whatever, if it's a couple files for a utility it's probably in Ruby, but if it's something new and I expect it to be more than that I'll pick something else.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Ruby has some of Perl's problems. One's experience with a language is not merely writing greenfield code on your own. Instead it's maintaining and understanding other people's code, more often than not. If that task is burdensome and frustrating then your feelings towards the language in general will reflect that. Ruby encourages a lot of cowboy coding practices like monkey patching and so forth, which make maintenance a hazard.

scaryclam 9y ago

I think some of the dislike will be misplaced annoyance against rails.

bjz_ 9y ago

I'm one of the new generation of devs to have come into the startup world in Melbourne after Ruby stole its heart, and damn is it a mess and a maintenance nightmare. So many production bugs due to nil pointers, missing methods, etc, and a woeful time to be had if you want to start doing large scale refactors and clean up tech debt. Makes me sad that when faced with Java the generation before me escaped towards Smalltalk and Perl rather than towards ML and Haskell. Thankfully we seem to slowly be turning it around though. If only on the front end, that is - with Typescript, Elm, Flow, Reason, etc. In Melbourne the Rubyists seem to be running towards Elixir hoping it will save them, but having worked on a number of Elixir code bases it seems that while solving some problems it leaves many still standing. :(

andrew_wc_brown 9y ago
I've worked on over 40 Rails web-apps in the last 10 years and what I see it lots of apps built by juniors who didn't even bother to read the most basic conventions of the frameworks which result in bizarre behaviour. At least in Rails if you have to refactor you know what it should be refactored to. Frameworks based in other langs have no concrete conventions and this willfully frees developers to write bizarre over engineer web-apps.
swat535 9y ago
None of the points you made are specific to ruby. Any language can have technical debt, dangling pointers and so on. I think you might have had the misfortune of running into mismanaged code bases.
- bjz_ 9y ago
  > Any language can have technical debt, dangling pointers and so on Any language can have tech debt, but I want access to tools in order to help me refactor my way out of that. Working with Ruby feels like building on a foundation of sand with mashed potatoes. It requires a huge amount of discipline to maintain a good enough test suite to combat code rot, and even then, a sufficiently paranoid test suite becomes a hindrance to change (not arguing against tests, just how much extra testing a dynamic lang requires of you if you want to have confidence). You have to refactor incredibly slowly, one small change at a time. Dangling pointers are not an issue in languages like Haskell, and ML. We've had these around for decades. Thankfully most newer languages are banishing them.