5 ms·

People have been saying its dying for years, yet here we are. Your reasoning doesn't quite make sense, not everyone wants or needs to do ML - choose the right t

by _hbm 3y ago

People have been saying its dying for years, yet here we are. Your reasoning doesn't quite make sense, not everyone wants or needs to do ML - choose the right tool for the job.

norman784 3y ago
It might be not dying but, for example, our company banned new apps to be build with Ruby and Javascript, instead new apps needs to be build with Go or Rust, existing apps will continue to be written in Ruby and no plans to migrate to other languages, but at some point I think it would be migrated and/or deprecated.
- nik736 3y ago
  How did it work out for you? Are developers faster/slower/same as working with Ruby?
  - itake 3y ago
    The benefits to go or rust isn't hands-on-the-keyboard developer velocity. Servers in Golang or rust will run faster (lower cloud costs). It also has lower risk of bugs and side effects. Coding in go is slower than ruby, but debugging go code is 100x easier than debugging ruby or python code. Once companies hit a certain size, the zoom-meeting time or system design time is an order of magnitude greater than coding time.
itake 3y ago
Something can be dying for years and not be dead. Other languages (python, golang, rust, ts) left ruby behind. Even big tech companies founded on rails have diversified their tech (Airbnb, Github, Stripe, etc.). Most companies will have an DS/ML team. "ruby" doesn't scale (in that you can't write efficient ruby code that can process data at the same level as python/c++ can without writing c-extensions to the underyling cpp libraries). checkout how ruby has fallen off a cliff on github: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3
- pelagicAustral 3y ago
  You come off as an extremely bitter person. Why so much anger directed at a programming language (of all things)? Companies you mention HAD to scale up, then their stacks diversified... hell, Facebook was built on PHP, and when he time came for a chat functionality to be implemented they used Erlang, not because PHP is shit, but because concurrency and resiliency was better handled by a different programming language... Realistically, most applications will never need to scale up. So what's wrong with a nice framework that allows people to just get stuff done?
  - rufugee 3y ago
    Umm...pointing to facts based on real data isn't bitter. Did you see even look at the graph that was shared? It's pretty clear ruby is trending downward and I say this as a past long-time ruby advocate and fan.
    - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
      I think that you're conflating correlation with causation. I think it's more plausible to assume it was the early numbers that are skewed and non-representative. The fact that GitHub itself was is a killer app of the Ruby on Rails, and that the Rails project itself changed to being hosted on GitHub somewhat very early on it's history [1] had a disproportionate effect on the early community that gathered there. Now GitHub attracts a much more diverse portfolio of projects, so the numbers you see there are less statistically biased towards early Ruby on Rails adopters. [1] Commit history on the main branch of rails/rails via github goes as far as Apr 10, 2008 https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/c67e985994362290308073ed2793dd8e7f2a76db https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/c67e985994362290308073...
      - itake 3y ago
        Even github is moving off ruby. Their search tool was re-written in golang and rust, cutting their server costs in half.
  - 3y ago
berkes 3y ago
In absolute numbers it may be doing fine. Steadily growing even (I don't think it is). But in relative numbers, that means a significant decline. In many niches and usecase, that practically means obsolence. Keep in mind that the amount of new people in software development have been almost doubling each year, for decades. I'm in Ruby and Rails fulltime for over 12 years now. Almost all the work I come across is either legacy, maintenance, upgrading or untangling spaghetti. One reason for that may be that Rails is optimized for "one man shops", which by nature aren't jobs people have vacancies or hires for. But the more logical reason is that people just don't start new projects in Rails anymore. Not on a practically significant scale, anyway. For every new rails project, there's probably hundreds of python, typescript, rust, Java and PHP projects. In web alone.

by _hbm 3y ago

People have been saying its dying for years, yet here we are. Your reasoning doesn't quite make sense, not everyone wants or needs to do ML - choose the right tool for the job.

norman784 3y ago

It might be not dying but, for example, our company banned new apps to be build with Ruby and Javascript, instead new apps needs to be build with Go or Rust, existing apps will continue to be written in Ruby and no plans to migrate to other languages, but at some point I think it would be migrated and/or deprecated.

nik736 3y ago
How did it work out for you? Are developers faster/slower/same as working with Ruby?
- itake 3y ago
  The benefits to go or rust isn't hands-on-the-keyboard developer velocity. Servers in Golang or rust will run faster (lower cloud costs). It also has lower risk of bugs and side effects. Coding in go is slower than ruby, but debugging go code is 100x easier than debugging ruby or python code. Once companies hit a certain size, the zoom-meeting time or system design time is an order of magnitude greater than coding time.

itake 3y ago

Something can be dying for years and not be dead. Other languages (python, golang, rust, ts) left ruby behind. Even big tech companies founded on rails have diversified their tech (Airbnb, Github, Stripe, etc.). Most companies will have an DS/ML team. "ruby" doesn't scale (in that you can't write efficient ruby code that can process data at the same level as python/c++ can without writing c-extensions to the underyling cpp libraries). checkout how ruby has fallen off a cliff on github: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3

pelagicAustral 3y ago
You come off as an extremely bitter person. Why so much anger directed at a programming language (of all things)? Companies you mention HAD to scale up, then their stacks diversified... hell, Facebook was built on PHP, and when he time came for a chat functionality to be implemented they used Erlang, not because PHP is shit, but because concurrency and resiliency was better handled by a different programming language... Realistically, most applications will never need to scale up. So what's wrong with a nice framework that allows people to just get stuff done?
- rufugee 3y ago
  Umm...pointing to facts based on real data isn't bitter. Did you see even look at the graph that was shared? It's pretty clear ruby is trending downward and I say this as a past long-time ruby advocate and fan.
  - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
    I think that you're conflating correlation with causation. I think it's more plausible to assume it was the early numbers that are skewed and non-representative. The fact that GitHub itself was is a killer app of the Ruby on Rails, and that the Rails project itself changed to being hosted on GitHub somewhat very early on it's history [1] had a disproportionate effect on the early community that gathered there. Now GitHub attracts a much more diverse portfolio of projects, so the numbers you see there are less statistically biased towards early Ruby on Rails adopters. [1] Commit history on the main branch of rails/rails via github goes as far as Apr 10, 2008 https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/c67e985994362290308073ed2793dd8e7f2a76db https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/c67e985994362290308073...
    - itake 3y ago
      Even github is moving off ruby. Their search tool was re-written in golang and rust, cutting their server costs in half.
- 3y ago

berkes 3y ago

In absolute numbers it may be doing fine. Steadily growing even (I don't think it is). But in relative numbers, that means a significant decline. In many niches and usecase, that practically means obsolence. Keep in mind that the amount of new people in software development have been almost doubling each year, for decades. I'm in Ruby and Rails fulltime for over 12 years now. Almost all the work I come across is either legacy, maintenance, upgrading or untangling spaghetti. One reason for that may be that Rails is optimized for "one man shops", which by nature aren't jobs people have vacancies or hires for. But the more logical reason is that people just don't start new projects in Rails anymore. Not on a practically significant scale, anyway. For every new rails project, there's probably hundreds of python, typescript, rust, Java and PHP projects. In web alone.