7 ms·

The Rails-centrism is only a western phenomenon, in Japan the focus for using Ruby is a very different one. http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio-engineering

• busterarm 9y ago
  Ruby developer in the west here. Stopped using Rails in my professional and personal work pretty much immediately on starting my career (not saying that I wouldn't use it). My last web projects were all Jekyll. 99.9% my work involved (past tense, I'm a Systems Engineer now) ETL processes and Ruby is a serious workhorse there. I've done extremely complex jobs in plain Ruby, the Kiba DSL or just using Ruby to augment/encapsulate shell commands (ruby script in crontab->curl wrapper[typhoeus] to fetch data & write to file->%x(some grep/sed/awk stuff)->do more work with output in ruby). I've never found better tools for doing this kind of work. I've seen some _nightmarish_ Node or Python projects to do similar. It's very, very rare that Ruby and its performance are my bottleneck doing this kind of work. Usually it's platform (ahem...Salesforce) or database limitations. GNU Parallel fills in the gaps usually. Ruby is the only language I've found where I can consistently hand off my work to others. They comment on the code being clean and they keep it clean with their changes.
  • busterarm 9y ago
    Just to add a funny story: The place I just got hired by is pretty much all Python. They half-joke about hating Ruby. I did all of my challenges/problem walkthroughs in Ruby because I felt like it best communicated the problem and problem solution in code. The number of times I heard "that solution is so clean" or "this solution would be way more involved in Python" from my interviewers would take more fingers to count than I have hands.
    • justatdotin 9y ago
      so, 3?
    • nine_k 9y ago
      An example of a problem where Ruby significantly outshines Python would be welcome.