6 ms·

I think you're spot on. Ruby actually gained wider appeal only when it gained visibility in the US (via rails). Being present in the markets which drive adoptio

by chucke 4y ago

I think you're spot on. Ruby actually gained wider appeal only when it gained visibility in the US (via rails). Being present in the markets which drive adoption matters more than being consistent, which python isn't ("one way of doing things" is mostly a meme nowadays, everyone touching python knows it's fake).

ilyt 4y ago
PHP got popular coz it could get barely code-literate HTML/CSS web designer to write a dynamic app, and host it easily Ruby got popular coz Rails could get barely code-literate graduate to write CRUD app and so it was cheap (famous 15 minutes to blog tutorial) for companies. JS got popular coz, well you ain't got fucking choice on frontend and having your then-frontend JS/HTML/CSS designer be able to also do backend is, well, again, easy and cheap. There is clear pattern here...
- hoipaloi 4y ago
  I'm gonna disagree with "Ruby got popular coz Rails could get barely code-literate graduate to write CRUD app and so it was cheap (famous 15 minutes to blog tutorial) for companies." That's not what happened, instead Ruby got popular with advanced web developers working in Java who saw that Rails was had better answers than J2EE. If you were barely code-literate graduate you wouldn't recognize that Rails was offering new unique ways doing things. The 15 minute blog tutorial wasn't really indicative of what Rails was like, just a small sample about how it was different. It was an advanced tool for advanced users with a long learning curve that eventually paid off in better productivity.
  - michaelteter 4y ago
    > advanced web developers working in Java who saw that Rails was had better answers than J2EE I was not "advanced" at web development in 2006, but this is exactly what got me to try Ruby. Previously I had been reasonably happy with JSP and Java Servlets, but this Rails thing promised a better way. And it turned out for most of my needs, it was much better. Also, the Rails Depot book was excellent, even back in the 1.x days (IIRC). It covered enough that you could build a fully working app with sessions, auth, crud, and reasonably abstracted layouts/views. Oh, and because Ruby was "simple", you honestly could start with that Rails book without knowing Ruby.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    I was doing J2EE and was hardly surprised with Rails. We did Rails one decade earlier with our own version of AOLServer. The very reason we went to .NET (as beta testers during its availability only to MSFT partners) was because we were fed up having to rewrite TCL into C due to performance issues. All the Active Record stuff was already something that AOLServer introduced, and we had an improved approach on our product. The founders of that company went on to create OutSystems based on our learnings.
- mhink 4y ago
  > JS got popular coz, well you ain't got fucking choice on frontend and having your then-frontend JS/HTML/CSS designer be able to also do backend is, well, again, easy and cheap. IIRC, a bigger reason for Node's popularity (at least at the very beginning of its popularity) was the fact that it had event-based I/O, which let a single process handle a lot more in-flight requests than Ruby (where the concurrency model was to spin up a bunch of processes and multiplex across them with nginx or similar).
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Famous TCL paper from 1995, regarding event based programming. "Why Threads Are A Bad Idea (for most purposes)" https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/threads.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/threads.pdf
    - samsquire 4y ago
      I don't think threads are a poor idea but they have sharp edges. I work on multithreaded software and I get 31,516,776 synchronizations per second with a lock free algorithm and 12 threads and 31,565,052 on the lock benchmark. When the threads are increased to 100 (contention) the lock benchmark does 3,419,271 requests per second whereas the lock free algorithm does 19,926,428 so the contention hurts them both but the lock free benchmark scales far better. Threads aren't bad. The domain is not easy.

by chucke 4y ago

ilyt 4y ago

PHP got popular coz it could get barely code-literate HTML/CSS web designer to write a dynamic app, and host it easily Ruby got popular coz Rails could get barely code-literate graduate to write CRUD app and so it was cheap (famous 15 minutes to blog tutorial) for companies. JS got popular coz, well you ain't got fucking choice on frontend and having your then-frontend JS/HTML/CSS designer be able to also do backend is, well, again, easy and cheap. There is clear pattern here...

hoipaloi 4y ago
I'm gonna disagree with "Ruby got popular coz Rails could get barely code-literate graduate to write CRUD app and so it was cheap (famous 15 minutes to blog tutorial) for companies." That's not what happened, instead Ruby got popular with advanced web developers working in Java who saw that Rails was had better answers than J2EE. If you were barely code-literate graduate you wouldn't recognize that Rails was offering new unique ways doing things. The 15 minute blog tutorial wasn't really indicative of what Rails was like, just a small sample about how it was different. It was an advanced tool for advanced users with a long learning curve that eventually paid off in better productivity.
- michaelteter 4y ago
  > advanced web developers working in Java who saw that Rails was had better answers than J2EE I was not "advanced" at web development in 2006, but this is exactly what got me to try Ruby. Previously I had been reasonably happy with JSP and Java Servlets, but this Rails thing promised a better way. And it turned out for most of my needs, it was much better. Also, the Rails Depot book was excellent, even back in the 1.x days (IIRC). It covered enough that you could build a fully working app with sessions, auth, crud, and reasonably abstracted layouts/views. Oh, and because Ruby was "simple", you honestly could start with that Rails book without knowing Ruby.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  I was doing J2EE and was hardly surprised with Rails. We did Rails one decade earlier with our own version of AOLServer. The very reason we went to .NET (as beta testers during its availability only to MSFT partners) was because we were fed up having to rewrite TCL into C due to performance issues. All the Active Record stuff was already something that AOLServer introduced, and we had an improved approach on our product. The founders of that company went on to create OutSystems based on our learnings.
mhink 4y ago
> JS got popular coz, well you ain't got fucking choice on frontend and having your then-frontend JS/HTML/CSS designer be able to also do backend is, well, again, easy and cheap. IIRC, a bigger reason for Node's popularity (at least at the very beginning of its popularity) was the fact that it had event-based I/O, which let a single process handle a lot more in-flight requests than Ruby (where the concurrency model was to spin up a bunch of processes and multiplex across them with nginx or similar).
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Famous TCL paper from 1995, regarding event based programming. "Why Threads Are A Bad Idea (for most purposes)" https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/threads.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/threads.pdf
  - samsquire 4y ago
    I don't think threads are a poor idea but they have sharp edges. I work on multithreaded software and I get 31,516,776 synchronizations per second with a lock free algorithm and 12 threads and 31,565,052 on the lock benchmark. When the threads are increased to 100 (contention) the lock benchmark does 3,419,271 requests per second whereas the lock free algorithm does 19,926,428 so the contention hurts them both but the lock free benchmark scales far better. Threads aren't bad. The domain is not easy.