3 ms·

Honestly, as a rubyist, I more and more often run into new "SDKs" that don't have an official ruby version supported! Ruby is no longer always considered popula

Honestly, as a rubyist, I more and more often run into new "SDKs" that don't have an official ruby version supported! Ruby is no longer always considered popular enough to get an SDK from a vendor. I think the fundamental truth here is that so much of writing software these days is having open source to rely on. That applies to things like an SDK for a vendor API, but also applies to things like consolidating community effort on one approach to back-end web app -- instead of having a bunch of not really mature options, and also so effort can be consolidated on building additional things that work with that popular tool. I don't think these two areas are actually related like the OP does -- if we can just reach consensus on a web framework, then somehow we'll get things like a Stripe SDK, I'm not sure about that.... but I think the general challenge of "how do we get a sustainable, supported, mature/polished open source ecosystem of software that we can use that works together" is kind something we don't really understand, how does that happen (or not) for a new language? I don't think it's just "well, if we only get popular enough it'll happen on it's own", and of course there is a chicken and egg issue there too.

nickjj 4y ago
> I think the general challenge of "how do we get a sustainable, supported, mature/polished open source ecosystem of software that we can use that works together" is kind something we don't really understand I think one problem is people who tend to flock to niche languages like to write libraries so what happens is you get a random person on the internet who makes a library, then they eventually stop using it personally and the project dies because they were the sole maintainer championing the project. You have this happen in parallel and the next thing you know you have 3-4 libraries that are either missing big features, fall out of date, go into maintenance mode, etc.. I saw this a lot with Elixir's community libraries (Stripe, AWS SDK, pagination, etc.). There is a chicken / egg aspect to it because I think the fix here is to eventually get popular enough where you have a large enough of a community around the language and ecosystem that the most popular projects for a specific feature get so popular that they can't die because too many people depend on it and then a bunch of folks start to contribute to it and the community informally blesses 1 solution as "the" solution. The chicken / egg problem here is that a lot of people want to use Stripe, not create a library to use Stripe, etc. so it never gets mass adopted. I think the best way for this to happen is organically. Trying to create a committee with an org with specific contributors trying to invent solutions is going about it in the opposite way. The best libraries tend to be extracted out of real projects and grow to become popular because the person or people behind it have a skillset around not only creating high quality software but also a dedication to create great documentation, can handle support, have lots of tests and generally have created a maintainable code base that makes it easy for others to contribute. > Ruby is no longer always considered popular enough to get an SDK from a vendor. Do you have a bunch of examples here? I haven't come across that with the usual libs I use (Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, Sentry, Datadog, Mux, AWS, etc.).
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I feel like seeing the ruby open-source-developing community shrink a bit, and formerly community-supported libraries starting to become more abandoned or have more trouble staying maintained, is giving me a different perspective on "if the language just gets popular enough this will take care of itself." But also just seeing in general more people trying to make money with open source. I think the way open source "naturally" gets produced for free is not what it was 15+ years ago. > Do you have a bunch of examples here I don't recall any off the top of my head, because of course it's nothing I use, working in ruby. Most of the ones you mention have been around with ruby SDK's for over 10 years already, had them released when ruby was still at the top. And certainly an SDK is still more likely to be available in ruby than elixir or clojure. Let me see if I can find a few examples remembering the sorts of things I was seeing... OK some examples that don't have vendor-supplied ruby SDK but do for other languages: * vimeo: https://developer.vimeo.com/api/libraries https://developer.vimeo.com/api/libraries * slack: https://api.slack.com/tools https://api.slack.com/tools * dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation In some cases there are third-party open source libraries available, often with limited coverage and/or kind of abandoned. Vimeo is the only one I really dug into, the third-party open source "sdks" did not seem to meet my needs or do much.
  - nickjj 4y ago
    Ah, I'm surprised Slack doesn't support Ruby, but to be fair they are pretty tight on official support with only Python, Node and Java. Fortunately there's https://github.com/slack-ruby/slack-ruby-client https://github.com/slack-ruby/slack-ruby-client, but it's not official. Although it seems to be a good example of a community driven library coming together. I haven't used it personally (I never interfaced with Slack in a Ruby app) but at a glance it looks like it has really good docs, a decent amount of contributors, well maintained, etc.. If I were building some Rails app that used Slack I'd likely reach for this and not feel bad about it. Kind of a bummer on the other 2 tho. Thankfully I wouldn't be building too many apps using those tools, but I get the point you're making. In the grand scheme of things I think this also shows how much more popular Python is than Ruby.
int_19h 4y ago
The whole thing with niche languages remaining niche because they don't get access to popular libraries has been a thing for a very long time. It was actually worse before OSS became dominant, because proprietary libraries generally shipped as binaries, and so you'd be limited not only to specific languages, but to specific implementations and versions thereof that'd support the ABI.

nickjj 4y ago

> I think the general challenge of "how do we get a sustainable, supported, mature/polished open source ecosystem of software that we can use that works together" is kind something we don't really understand I think one problem is people who tend to flock to niche languages like to write libraries so what happens is you get a random person on the internet who makes a library, then they eventually stop using it personally and the project dies because they were the sole maintainer championing the project. You have this happen in parallel and the next thing you know you have 3-4 libraries that are either missing big features, fall out of date, go into maintenance mode, etc.. I saw this a lot with Elixir's community libraries (Stripe, AWS SDK, pagination, etc.). There is a chicken / egg aspect to it because I think the fix here is to eventually get popular enough where you have a large enough of a community around the language and ecosystem that the most popular projects for a specific feature get so popular that they can't die because too many people depend on it and then a bunch of folks start to contribute to it and the community informally blesses 1 solution as "the" solution. The chicken / egg problem here is that a lot of people want to use Stripe, not create a library to use Stripe, etc. so it never gets mass adopted. I think the best way for this to happen is organically. Trying to create a committee with an org with specific contributors trying to invent solutions is going about it in the opposite way. The best libraries tend to be extracted out of real projects and grow to become popular because the person or people behind it have a skillset around not only creating high quality software but also a dedication to create great documentation, can handle support, have lots of tests and generally have created a maintainable code base that makes it easy for others to contribute. > Ruby is no longer always considered popular enough to get an SDK from a vendor. Do you have a bunch of examples here? I haven't come across that with the usual libs I use (Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, Sentry, Datadog, Mux, AWS, etc.).

jrochkind1 4y ago
I feel like seeing the ruby open-source-developing community shrink a bit, and formerly community-supported libraries starting to become more abandoned or have more trouble staying maintained, is giving me a different perspective on "if the language just gets popular enough this will take care of itself." But also just seeing in general more people trying to make money with open source. I think the way open source "naturally" gets produced for free is not what it was 15+ years ago. > Do you have a bunch of examples here I don't recall any off the top of my head, because of course it's nothing I use, working in ruby. Most of the ones you mention have been around with ruby SDK's for over 10 years already, had them released when ruby was still at the top. And certainly an SDK is still more likely to be available in ruby than elixir or clojure. Let me see if I can find a few examples remembering the sorts of things I was seeing... OK some examples that don't have vendor-supplied ruby SDK but do for other languages: * vimeo: https://developer.vimeo.com/api/libraries https://developer.vimeo.com/api/libraries * slack: https://api.slack.com/tools https://api.slack.com/tools * dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation In some cases there are third-party open source libraries available, often with limited coverage and/or kind of abandoned. Vimeo is the only one I really dug into, the third-party open source "sdks" did not seem to meet my needs or do much.
- nickjj 4y ago
  Ah, I'm surprised Slack doesn't support Ruby, but to be fair they are pretty tight on official support with only Python, Node and Java. Fortunately there's https://github.com/slack-ruby/slack-ruby-client https://github.com/slack-ruby/slack-ruby-client, but it's not official. Although it seems to be a good example of a community driven library coming together. I haven't used it personally (I never interfaced with Slack in a Ruby app) but at a glance it looks like it has really good docs, a decent amount of contributors, well maintained, etc.. If I were building some Rails app that used Slack I'd likely reach for this and not feel bad about it. Kind of a bummer on the other 2 tho. Thankfully I wouldn't be building too many apps using those tools, but I get the point you're making. In the grand scheme of things I think this also shows how much more popular Python is than Ruby.

int_19h 4y ago

The whole thing with niche languages remaining niche because they don't get access to popular libraries has been a thing for a very long time. It was actually worse before OSS became dominant, because proprietary libraries generally shipped as binaries, and so you'd be limited not only to specific languages, but to specific implementations and versions thereof that'd support the ABI.