3 ms·

Why is Ruby so popular here at HackerNews, I just don't get it!

burlesona 6y ago
A very large number of SAAS products are built in (or started out in) Ruby, including these that I know of: Github, Gitlab, Twitter, Shopify, Stripe, AirBNB. There are more but those are the ones that come to the top of my mind. The engineers working at those places represent a non-trivial chunk of the software engineering world, especially in San Francisco, and SWE’s (especially in San Francisco) are a major cohort of HN readers. Additionally, the Ruby ecosystem had a major influence on many other ecosystems that spun out for various reasons. For example, Sinatra popularized the “minimal REST framework” and has been a major design influence on dozens of others, like ExpressJS and Flask. CoffeeScript, which established “transpile into JavaScript” as a thing, and profoundly influenced the shape of ES6, was heavily adopted and made prominent by the Rails team. Similarly notable projects like Ember, Elixir and Phoenix, were created by former Ruby and Rails core team members, Crystal is inspired by it, and plenty of older projects like SailsJS or Grails for groovy, etc. IIRC Rust’s cargo package management system and JS Yarn were also inspired by and contributed to by Ruby core folks. It’s influence is a lot bigger than its footprint. So Ruby is a nice, elegant language with a lot of influence in the software world, it’s used by many readers here, and a lot of people here have “warm fuzzy feelings” about it enjoy sharing and discussing interesting news or tidbits about it. That’s why :)
dang 6y ago
Off-topic, sorry, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- SydneyPumpkin 6y ago
  got it
ksec 6y ago
Assuming you are new to HN and not a new Account. Ruby is not popular on HN, in fact it is quite unpopular. May be popular is not the correct word, I still remember when HN ( I didn't have an account then ) was basically an Erlang site. It was hype, and in the grand scheme of things it certainly wasn't "popular" in usage.

A very large number of SAAS products are built in (or started out in) Ruby, including these that I know of: Github, Gitlab, Twitter, Shopify, Stripe, AirBNB. There are more but those are the ones that come to the top of my mind. The engineers working at those places represent a non-trivial chunk of the software engineering world, especially in San Francisco, and SWE’s (especially in San Francisco) are a major cohort of HN readers. Additionally, the Ruby ecosystem had a major influence on many other ecosystems that spun out for various reasons. For example, Sinatra popularized the “minimal REST framework” and has been a major design influence on dozens of others, like ExpressJS and Flask. CoffeeScript, which established “transpile into JavaScript” as a thing, and profoundly influenced the shape of ES6, was heavily adopted and made prominent by the Rails team. Similarly notable projects like Ember, Elixir and Phoenix, were created by former Ruby and Rails core team members, Crystal is inspired by it, and plenty of older projects like SailsJS or Grails for groovy, etc. IIRC Rust’s cargo package management system and JS Yarn were also inspired by and contributed to by Ruby core folks. It’s influence is a lot bigger than its footprint. So Ruby is a nice, elegant language with a lot of influence in the software world, it’s used by many readers here, and a lot of people here have “warm fuzzy feelings” about it enjoy sharing and discussing interesting news or tidbits about it. That’s why :)

dang 6y ago

Off-topic, sorry, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

SydneyPumpkin 6y ago
got it

ksec 6y ago

Assuming you are new to HN and not a new Account. Ruby is not popular on HN, in fact it is quite unpopular. May be popular is not the correct word, I still remember when HN ( I didn't have an account then ) was basically an Erlang site. It was hype, and in the grand scheme of things it certainly wasn't "popular" in usage.