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It always bothered me that Ruby isn't used as much as Python is used outside of web development. I think Ruby is a nicer language than Python is in many ways.

busterarm 9y ago
Lots of operations code was written in Ruby. Just look at Chef, Capistrano and Puppet. That whole field wants to be Google though and thinks they have Google's problems, so now it's mostly all Python and Go. HashiCorp has written some great stuff at least.
- dictum 9y ago
  > That whole field wants to be Google though and thinks they have Google's problems It's becoming a recurring phenonemon, isn't it? I feel the same with frontend web development: everyone wants to be Facebook.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    preaching to the f'ing choir here mate. The volume of material out there written to help people improve the performance of their React applications makes it pretty clear to me that folks aren't looking before they leap. I've seen more than a couple dozen projects with ~20-40 lines of simple, performant, vanilla JS turn into multi-hundred line behemoths + _an entire React framework_ for exactly zero benefit to end users because of "best practices".
- Twirrim 9y ago
  > That whole field wants to be Google though and thinks they have Google's problems, so now it's mostly all Python and Go Python has been more relevant in operations work for quite a while, and for a lot longer Google has been talking about their use of it. (speaking as someone with approaching 2 decades experience on the sysadmin/operations side of work) Readability and ease of learning were big bonuses, particularly given sysadmin types were historically more likely to fall in to the work, and as likely to not have formal compsci backgrounds. That it also made life a heck of a lot easier to interact with APIs was also invaluable. Perl used to be an incredible pain for API work (I learnt python and wrote automation around APIs in less time than it took me as an experienced perl programmer to write similar tooling in perl.) You also have to remember that python has perl's advantage, it's everywhere. Every major Linux distro has shipped with it for a long time. I'm rusty on that specific aspect historically, I would guess it's probably due to Redhat and all their automation being historically python based.
metacontent 9y ago
* Ruby is a nicer language than Python. Not only that, it's cleaner, more flexible, and faster. It's a shame more people don't think for themselves rather than just jumping on the PR bandwagon. But that's life.

busterarm 9y ago

Lots of operations code was written in Ruby. Just look at Chef, Capistrano and Puppet. That whole field wants to be Google though and thinks they have Google's problems, so now it's mostly all Python and Go. HashiCorp has written some great stuff at least.

dictum 9y ago
> That whole field wants to be Google though and thinks they have Google's problems It's becoming a recurring phenonemon, isn't it? I feel the same with frontend web development: everyone wants to be Facebook.
- busterarm 9y ago
  preaching to the f'ing choir here mate. The volume of material out there written to help people improve the performance of their React applications makes it pretty clear to me that folks aren't looking before they leap. I've seen more than a couple dozen projects with ~20-40 lines of simple, performant, vanilla JS turn into multi-hundred line behemoths + _an entire React framework_ for exactly zero benefit to end users because of "best practices".
Twirrim 9y ago
> That whole field wants to be Google though and thinks they have Google's problems, so now it's mostly all Python and Go Python has been more relevant in operations work for quite a while, and for a lot longer Google has been talking about their use of it. (speaking as someone with approaching 2 decades experience on the sysadmin/operations side of work) Readability and ease of learning were big bonuses, particularly given sysadmin types were historically more likely to fall in to the work, and as likely to not have formal compsci backgrounds. That it also made life a heck of a lot easier to interact with APIs was also invaluable. Perl used to be an incredible pain for API work (I learnt python and wrote automation around APIs in less time than it took me as an experienced perl programmer to write similar tooling in perl.) You also have to remember that python has perl's advantage, it's everywhere. Every major Linux distro has shipped with it for a long time. I'm rusty on that specific aspect historically, I would guess it's probably due to Redhat and all their automation being historically python based.

metacontent 9y ago

* Ruby is a nicer language than Python. Not only that, it's cleaner, more flexible, and faster. It's a shame more people don't think for themselves rather than just jumping on the PR bandwagon. But that's life.