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It hurts seeing Ruby listed as a dreaded language. I think what is actually dreaded is Rails, and the terrible, awful, no-good things PM's forced it to do in th

It hurts seeing Ruby listed as a dreaded language. I think what is actually dreaded is Rails, and the terrible, awful, no-good things PM's forced it to do in the 2010's. I'm a Python developer now, but I still miss the ease of writing code in Ruby. I find it a cushy, intuitive activity, and I wish it was used for something other than hulking, poorly scaled/planned out web apps of yesterdecade.

wsc981 5y ago
It's funny how quickly opinions seem to change. When I first visited HN (~2010) it seemed Ruby and Rails was all the hype; doing Ruby/Rails stuff seemed to be the hip and cool thing to do. Perhaps Heroku was also introduced around this time? Nowadays it seems Rails is mostly forgotten and Ruby, well ... Python seemed to have dethroned Ruby as Python seems to be used for similar purposes. I tried to get into Rails in the past, but it didn't quite click with me. Perhaps in part because I don't do web dev by trade. In general I just don't enjoy web dev. Ruby as a language, I did enjoy and I used it in combination with Calabash for iOS tests. But I believe most of my team members didn't get the same kind of enjoyment out of Ruby as I did, much preferring much to work with statically typed languages, as such most didn't get involved in writing UI tests too much and just focused solely on the mobile app work. I also used Ruby as a replacement for some shell scripts, when a shell script would be too complicated and problematic to write. Just last year (after a few borked initial attempts) I really got into Lua [0] and I have to say, I enjoy it even more than I did Ruby in the past and also most statically typed languages that I've worked with (C#, Swift, Objective-C, ...). Lua (with LÖVE [1]) is awesome to me. Lua seems to be a very neat small little language that is build on just a few very simple concepts, which makes it pretty easy to wrap your head around it. With Ruby there would be quite a bit of magic (complicated internals) happening, which I don't see in Lua. Some people mentioned Lua might be hard to use in big projects, but I believe it should be manageable and I hope to write a pretty big game using Lua and LÖVE in the future. --- [0]: http://www.lua.org http://www.lua.org [1]: https://love2d.org https://love2d.org
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Rails is still the elephant in any web application room. But it isn't hype-y, it's just the mature option for its use case.
  - Rooster61 5y ago
    I'd say Django is encroaching on that territory more these days, but Rails is still the bear's share.
    - sanderjd 5y ago
      You may be right because I haven't had my ear to the ground recently, but I thought this like a decade ago (at least 8 years ago, I know I did), so I guess I'm slightly skeptical.
- munificent 5y ago
  > It's funny how quickly opinions seem to change. Ruby's popularity peaked during Web 2.0 when almost all new apps were server-side web apps. When smartphones came out and a massive fraction of development shifted over to client side apps, it sucked much of the air out of the room for Ruby and Rails. (And dynamic typing in general. Runtime performance is a fungible cost for server-side programming where you can throw hardware at it, but a hard requirement for client-side apps running on devices you don't control.)
- turndown 5y ago
  For anyone interested in the links he provided, I'll add a third, a nice tutorial that introduces you to LÖVE[0] [0]: https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30 https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30
zwieback 5y ago
Same, I came to scripting languages (at the time that's what they were) in the 90s via Ruby. Now Python is my goto, for practical reasons, when I'm not doing C# or C++ but I still miss Ruby. I only have a vague idea what Rails is so I just miss Ruby itself.
sanderjd 5y ago
Yeah I agree. I'm a bit mystified by the love for python. It is very clunky compared to ruby. I often wish ruby would have gone the scientific data route rather than the web services route, instead of python being the primary game in that town. But I am not at all mystified by people dreading rails.
Normille 5y ago
I love Ruby's syntax. But I've always found it a nightmare to install anything built in Ruby, due to the dependency spaghetti [even worse than Python's]. Which is why I really want Crystal to succeed.
- Rooster61 5y ago
  Hard disagree here. Moving from Ruby's dependency system over to Python's has probably been my biggest regret with Python. I still don't totally understand it. Gem's certainly aren't perfect, but I'd take them over Python packages any day.
intergalplan 5y ago
> I think what is actually dreaded is Rails, and the terrible, awful, no-good things PM's forced it to do in the 2010's. That's basically it, for me, yeah. Long-lived (or hell, pretty much any of them that aren't just getting started) Rails codebases, even when they're not particularly complex, without heroic levels of good processes & individual discipline to keep things reasonable and clear, become fucking nightmares to onboard to. I'm more wary of Rails than a bespoke PHP codebase, at this point, and "we're a Rails shop" is damn near an instant "well thanks for the interest, but no" from me. I don't need that stress for the dozenth time. Just done with it. It sure is impressive how fast one developer can knock together a prototype with Rails. Meanwhile I've had so many extremely-bad experiences with ongoing Rails projects that I hope never to touch one again. But I actually like using Ruby itself a lot better than, say, Python. Ruby's fine. Rails... no. Never again. Maybe if they embrace static typing and it becomes nigh-universal in the Rails library ecosystem, they can make it tolerable. Too much magic, too little help from my tools to help me understand WTF the magic is doing, where it comes from, et c.
hesarenu 5y ago
I do still like Ruby and not yet hate working on Rails app. But after using Typescript in Reactjs projects i just loved it. I have a new found love for typed languages. Now trying to move to either C# or Rust to get enough experience to confidently choose those for new projects.

wsc981 5y ago

It's funny how quickly opinions seem to change. When I first visited HN (~2010) it seemed Ruby and Rails was all the hype; doing Ruby/Rails stuff seemed to be the hip and cool thing to do. Perhaps Heroku was also introduced around this time? Nowadays it seems Rails is mostly forgotten and Ruby, well ... Python seemed to have dethroned Ruby as Python seems to be used for similar purposes. I tried to get into Rails in the past, but it didn't quite click with me. Perhaps in part because I don't do web dev by trade. In general I just don't enjoy web dev. Ruby as a language, I did enjoy and I used it in combination with Calabash for iOS tests. But I believe most of my team members didn't get the same kind of enjoyment out of Ruby as I did, much preferring much to work with statically typed languages, as such most didn't get involved in writing UI tests too much and just focused solely on the mobile app work. I also used Ruby as a replacement for some shell scripts, when a shell script would be too complicated and problematic to write. Just last year (after a few borked initial attempts) I really got into Lua [0] and I have to say, I enjoy it even more than I did Ruby in the past and also most statically typed languages that I've worked with (C#, Swift, Objective-C, ...). Lua (with LÖVE [1]) is awesome to me. Lua seems to be a very neat small little language that is build on just a few very simple concepts, which makes it pretty easy to wrap your head around it. With Ruby there would be quite a bit of magic (complicated internals) happening, which I don't see in Lua. Some people mentioned Lua might be hard to use in big projects, but I believe it should be manageable and I hope to write a pretty big game using Lua and LÖVE in the future. --- [0]: http://www.lua.org http://www.lua.org [1]: https://love2d.org https://love2d.org

sanderjd 5y ago
Rails is still the elephant in any web application room. But it isn't hype-y, it's just the mature option for its use case.
- Rooster61 5y ago
  I'd say Django is encroaching on that territory more these days, but Rails is still the bear's share.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    You may be right because I haven't had my ear to the ground recently, but I thought this like a decade ago (at least 8 years ago, I know I did), so I guess I'm slightly skeptical.
munificent 5y ago
> It's funny how quickly opinions seem to change. Ruby's popularity peaked during Web 2.0 when almost all new apps were server-side web apps. When smartphones came out and a massive fraction of development shifted over to client side apps, it sucked much of the air out of the room for Ruby and Rails. (And dynamic typing in general. Runtime performance is a fungible cost for server-side programming where you can throw hardware at it, but a hard requirement for client-side apps running on devices you don't control.)
turndown 5y ago
For anyone interested in the links he provided, I'll add a third, a nice tutorial that introduces you to LÖVE[0] [0]: https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30 https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30

zwieback 5y ago

Same, I came to scripting languages (at the time that's what they were) in the 90s via Ruby. Now Python is my goto, for practical reasons, when I'm not doing C# or C++ but I still miss Ruby. I only have a vague idea what Rails is so I just miss Ruby itself.

sanderjd 5y ago

Yeah I agree. I'm a bit mystified by the love for python. It is very clunky compared to ruby. I often wish ruby would have gone the scientific data route rather than the web services route, instead of python being the primary game in that town. But I am not at all mystified by people dreading rails.

Normille 5y ago

I love Ruby's syntax. But I've always found it a nightmare to install anything built in Ruby, due to the dependency spaghetti [even worse than Python's]. Which is why I really want Crystal to succeed.

Rooster61 5y ago
Hard disagree here. Moving from Ruby's dependency system over to Python's has probably been my biggest regret with Python. I still don't totally understand it. Gem's certainly aren't perfect, but I'd take them over Python packages any day.

intergalplan 5y ago

> I think what is actually dreaded is Rails, and the terrible, awful, no-good things PM's forced it to do in the 2010's. That's basically it, for me, yeah. Long-lived (or hell, pretty much any of them that aren't just getting started) Rails codebases, even when they're not particularly complex, without heroic levels of good processes & individual discipline to keep things reasonable and clear, become fucking nightmares to onboard to. I'm more wary of Rails than a bespoke PHP codebase, at this point, and "we're a Rails shop" is damn near an instant "well thanks for the interest, but no" from me. I don't need that stress for the dozenth time. Just done with it. It sure is impressive how fast one developer can knock together a prototype with Rails. Meanwhile I've had so many extremely-bad experiences with ongoing Rails projects that I hope never to touch one again. But I actually like using Ruby itself a lot better than, say, Python. Ruby's fine. Rails... no. Never again. Maybe if they embrace static typing and it becomes nigh-universal in the Rails library ecosystem, they can make it tolerable. Too much magic, too little help from my tools to help me understand WTF the magic is doing, where it comes from, et c.

hesarenu 5y ago

I do still like Ruby and not yet hate working on Rails app. But after using Typescript in Reactjs projects i just loved it. I have a new found love for typed languages. Now trying to move to either C# or Rust to get enough experience to confidently choose those for new projects.