3 ms·

A coworker of mine is leaving for a Ruby job, which caught me off guard, so I've had Ruby on the brain a bit lately. I was a big fan of Ruby for a few years bac

A coworker of mine is leaving for a Ruby job, which caught me off guard, so I've had Ruby on the brain a bit lately. I was a big fan of Ruby for a few years back in 2004-2006 or thereabouts. Rails was the new hot thing, but I wasn't into web dev so I didn't pay all that much attention to it. I remember blindsiding my networking professor by using Ruby for an assignment when he expected but failed to specify Java or C ... he was a good sport, thankfully. I strayed from the CS path into econometrics and then data science, so Ruby just wasn't a good fit for basically anything I do. That seems to remain the case, unfortunately, though I like it on the language level more than my bread and butter Python. Oh well.

vidarh 5y ago
I used Ruby for my MSc thesis... which involved applying statistical approaches to reduce error rates in OCR. I did have to call out to C code for a few things (k-means in Ruby 1.8.x was not fast...). Most of my Ruby work has been outside of web. Message brokers, cloud orchestration and assorted devops, a text editor (for my own use - it's replaced Emacs for me), financial simulations. And that means the majority of my work for the last 15 years. Ruby has gotten more low key, but for those of us who never really liked Rails that's not really mattered much.