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Because management want's to "get things done" and quickly "evaluate ideas", a dynamic and somewhat loose language is actually an advantage in prototyping. Also

by 0x008 4y ago

Because management want's to "get things done" and quickly "evaluate ideas", a dynamic and somewhat loose language is actually an advantage in prototyping. Also it is very easy to find new developers than for example if you'd use rust, because you can just hire any frontend dev. tooling can be built with money and money is usually not the issue for these companies.

carlivar 4y ago
Precisely. Twitter is a great example of this. I'm sure they have moved beyond Ruby in many areas but it was originally core and got them off the ground quickly, I presume.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Isn’t twitter running on Scala with Graal nowadays?
pizza234 4y ago
Splitting services and porting them to a faster language doesn't prevent prototyping in the main, slower, language (in this case, Ruby). It also doesn't need to be microservices madness - see GitLab (and also GitHub, but I think they don't open source their internal services), which rewrote some parts in Go.
pjmlp 4y ago
Dynamic and somewhat loose language doesn't preclude not having at very least JIT support out of the box, even BASIC was better in that regard. And if we take into account Ruby's predecessors, Smalltalk, SELF, Dylan.
- rileyphone 4y ago
  SELF was really fast, at least as claimed [0] - about half the speed of optimized C and quicker to compile. It was where the HotSpot tech for the JVM came from, and V8 uses a similar object model and thus techniques. Just wish they could have made it usable! [0] https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/practical.html https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/practical.html
  - igouy 4y ago
    afaict Self and Dylan were research projects / product development projects. Smalltalk had multiple commercial implementations and was used to build mission critical software in banks and utility companies and manufacturing companies and… https://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf https://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Apple sold Dylan to Harlequin, which sold it as a DylanWorks for some time. Smalltalk still has commercial implementations, like Cincom. https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/ https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/

by 0x008 4y ago

carlivar 4y ago

Precisely. Twitter is a great example of this. I'm sure they have moved beyond Ruby in many areas but it was originally core and got them off the ground quickly, I presume.

kaba0 4y ago
Isn’t twitter running on Scala with Graal nowadays?

pizza234 4y ago

Splitting services and porting them to a faster language doesn't prevent prototyping in the main, slower, language (in this case, Ruby). It also doesn't need to be microservices madness - see GitLab (and also GitHub, but I think they don't open source their internal services), which rewrote some parts in Go.

pjmlp 4y ago

Dynamic and somewhat loose language doesn't preclude not having at very least JIT support out of the box, even BASIC was better in that regard. And if we take into account Ruby's predecessors, Smalltalk, SELF, Dylan.

rileyphone 4y ago
SELF was really fast, at least as claimed [0] - about half the speed of optimized C and quicker to compile. It was where the HotSpot tech for the JVM came from, and V8 uses a similar object model and thus techniques. Just wish they could have made it usable! [0] https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/practical.html https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/practical.html
- igouy 4y ago
  afaict Self and Dylan were research projects / product development projects. Smalltalk had multiple commercial implementations and was used to build mission critical software in banks and utility companies and manufacturing companies and… https://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf https://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Apple sold Dylan to Harlequin, which sold it as a DylanWorks for some time. Smalltalk still has commercial implementations, like Cincom. https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/ https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/