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But just because it's easy doesn't mean it actually happens. My time is pretty much 50% Ruby, 50% JavaScript. "stdlib can be patched to do random stuff" is a c

But just because it's easy doesn't mean it actually happens. My time is pretty much 50% Ruby, 50% JavaScript. "stdlib can be patched to do random stuff" is a complaint I've often heard about Ruby, but in practice, I've encountered it precisely once in the last five years (extlib breaking with recent Ruby because of a to_h conflict, IIRC). I've lost way, way more time than that to JS idiosyncrasies.

lloeki 9y ago
> "stdlib can be patched to do random stuff" is a complaint I've often heard about Ruby, but in practice, I've encountered it precisely once in the last five years We've had something like 20 of those in the last year alone. 70% of those come from Rails, and some have been quite severe. Maybe it's tied to what we do which is definitely not a simple app, for which Ruby is not entirely the right one for the job but it's definitely not obviously the wrong one either. With years of business logic, tuning and bug fixing there are things you should never do[0], but even coming to terms with what Ruby is and what its limitations are after all these years in the trenches doesn't mean we can with absolute certainty avoid getting hit by structural damage coming from idiomatic flaws which we have clearly identified through proper root cause analysis to be endemic to the Ruby way (which includes a complete disregard for backwards compatibility, even when it can trivially be made so[1]). [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... [1]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/10085 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/10085
- Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
  That's interesting - I don't use Rails so don't see that so much. (A lot of Ruby hate traditionally seems to be misdirected Rails hate.) There's perhaps an argument for "Ruby - the Good Parts"... but you could argue that it exists and it's called Crystal.
  - mercer 9y ago
    Or Elixir.
- vidarh 9y ago
  Rails is basically it's own world, and libraries that are written predominantly to be used with Rails tends to be full of anti-patterns in my experience. Avoid Rails and Ruby becomes a far more pleasant place. Certainly not flawless, but you avoid a lot of the pain.

lloeki 9y ago

> "stdlib can be patched to do random stuff" is a complaint I've often heard about Ruby, but in practice, I've encountered it precisely once in the last five years We've had something like 20 of those in the last year alone. 70% of those come from Rails, and some have been quite severe. Maybe it's tied to what we do which is definitely not a simple app, for which Ruby is not entirely the right one for the job but it's definitely not obviously the wrong one either. With years of business logic, tuning and bug fixing there are things you should never do[0], but even coming to terms with what Ruby is and what its limitations are after all these years in the trenches doesn't mean we can with absolute certainty avoid getting hit by structural damage coming from idiomatic flaws which we have clearly identified through proper root cause analysis to be endemic to the Ruby way (which includes a complete disregard for backwards compatibility, even when it can trivially be made so[1]). [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... [1]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/10085 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/10085

Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
That's interesting - I don't use Rails so don't see that so much. (A lot of Ruby hate traditionally seems to be misdirected Rails hate.) There's perhaps an argument for "Ruby - the Good Parts"... but you could argue that it exists and it's called Crystal.
- mercer 9y ago
  Or Elixir.
vidarh 9y ago
Rails is basically it's own world, and libraries that are written predominantly to be used with Rails tends to be full of anti-patterns in my experience. Avoid Rails and Ruby becomes a far more pleasant place. Certainly not flawless, but you avoid a lot of the pain.