6 ms·

If that describes said ruby programmers, then why are they using Ruby? > Nevertheless, it seems to me you've become the thing you claim to despise: insular and

by nupark2 14y ago

If that describes said ruby programmers, then why are they using Ruby? > Nevertheless, it seems to me you've become the thing you claim to despise: insular and closed off to experiences that would contradict your dogmas. That would be the opposite of "polyglot". I can find value in Clojure's concurrency design, Python's scientific community, Scala's marriage of OO and functional, F#'s modernization of ML environments, C#'s language design, ObjC's UIKit/AppKit libraries, C's propensity for close-to-the-metal optimization without dropping to assembly, Haskell's lazy evaluation and functional purity, OCaml's mixture of pure functional with mutable state, Erlang's micro-thread actors, Java's virtual machine, Smalltalk's REPL-on-steroids, lua's JIT. However, almost nothing from Ruby. The technology there is almost totally uninteresting -- it's just yet another imperative scripting language with a poorly designed runtime -- and the community, unlike Python's, doesn't make up for it. In fact, that Ruby community is one of the primary things that seems to give technologists a bad name outside the technology industry. When I hear tales of sexist conference behavior, inappropriate language in presentations, and outright bad wheel-reinventing technology, the tales are almost always tied to either Ruby, youthful startups, or both. So -- no, I don't look forward to them joining the rest of us in the iOS space.

davesims 14y ago
You're describing a sub-group of young Valley-centric developers (and the occasional outspoken charismatic CEO), drawn to Rails because of its prominence in the start-up environment. It's simple numbers: since Rails is arguably the most popular for ambitious SV companies, then sure, it's going to reflect that culture to some extent. But the community runs deeper than that, and the "Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice" world still exists and thrives. That's the majority of the Ruby and Rails world I've encountered. Again, I'm sorry your poor sampling seems to have traumatized you into an an irrational, confirmation-bias myopia, but my experience has been very different. You like C#'s language design? Me too. I especially like its adoption of Ruby-ish idioms like lambdas and the LINQ collections DSL, and the C#-on-Rails framework goodness of ASP MVC. "it's just yet another imperative scripting language with a poorly designed runtime" Sweet Lord what an ignorant statement. Here's the thing that Ruby does astonishingly well that none of those others you mentioned can do: metaprogramming. None of the languages can touch Ruby for its ability to consolidate expressive, DSL-like idioms that eliminate code duplication (and therefore bugs), increase communication and application logic clarity. This is where Ruby really eclipses everybody else, in its ability to create frameworks, DSLs and micro-solutions that drive interesting and expressive conventions that drastically reduces the time it takes to code and deliver a feature out the door. This is why frameworks like Rails and Sinatra have been so successful with polyglot programmers like the ones I work with, and why new frameworks like Merb and Padrino keep popping up and offer new idioms and expressive possibilities. It's just a creative, open language to work with, that allows a creativity and level of surprising possibilities that have real business consequences. At the application level, where code conciseness and time-to-delivery are at a premium, Ruby simply shines.
- nupark2 14y ago
  I strongly disagree with your statement that Ruby excels and metaprogramming and DSLs. Other languages (Scala, C#, F#, etc) with coherent type systems have demonstrated an ability to define equivalently useful DSLs with the added property of validating correctness of a declarative language at compile time. You mention LINQ as somehow deriving from Ruby -- it doesn't, it derives from set theory, relational algebra, and some very careful consideration of how to model those in a typesafe environment. You fail to mention that LINQ is type-safe, which is an enormous advantage to its use compared to traditional approaches of modeling set theory / relational data problems, and has value for things well beyond databases or querying simple data structures, eg: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609 You claim lambdas as Ruby-ish idioms, and yet totally ignore where "lambda" derives from: lambda calculus. This is not a Ruby-ism, and Ruby discards much of what is of value in lambda calculus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Lambda_calculus_and_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Lambda_calculus... Ruby is a "me too" on those fronts, and not a particularly novel one.
  - davesims 14y ago
    "Ruby is a "me too" on those fronts, and not a particularly novel one." Of course. No one, especially not Matz, ever claimed Ruby was novel. Why should I care whether a language feature is new when I have features to ship? What you seem to be dogmatically, blindly ignoring is that Ruby's peculiar amalgamation of existing techniques, borrowed from (standing on the shoulders of) Smalltalk, Perl, Python, certain aspects of Lisp and others, created an expressiveness with those idioms that invited widespread adoption that Smalltalk and Lisp in all their glory only ever dreamed of. Innovation was the least of Ruby's concerns, and it's irrelevant to the conversation at hand. Type-safety seems to be a big thing for you. This may seem to be an enormous advantage to you, and I wish you well. I personally think type safety is the most overrated language feature in CS history. In my crankier moments I'd say it's essentially a compile-time unit test and refactoring/code-browsing crutch for IDE-jockeys that don't test their code. In my less-cranky moments...I'll probably say the same thing. And that's after a decade and an half in Java and C#, not quite a decade in Ruby. To me, type safety imposes far more overhead than it's worth -- generics, abstract classes, interfaces, all irrelevant and basically built-in and implicit in dynamic environments like Ruby. But that's another digression. Suffice it to say, in my entire software career I've kept track of the sum total of bugs I've fixed related to passing the wrong type to a method, or receiving a wrong type from a method, and that number, to date, is (whirring, calculating sounds): 0. Total number of times I wished I had a refactoring shortcut for "extract interface", "rename method", "introduce parameter object" in a Ruby environment: 0. I've not written a line of Scala or F#, so I can't speak to those, but the notion that C# could construct a DSL a fraction as concise and expressive as Ruby could is absurd. I like C# quite a bit, but let's not be ridiculous. And I never claimed that LINQ or C# lambdas were derived from Ruby, just that they were Ruby-ish. Clearly someone in Redmond is watching Ruby and Rails. ASP MVC directly borrows Rails idioms, and many aspects of LINQ seem to have at least had Ruby in view, like 'Select', etc., even down to using hashrockets, although in a different manner. I certainly wouldn't be the first to point these parallels out: http://nerdfortress.com/2008/06/12/c-30-encourages-rubyisms/ http://nerdfortress.com/2008/06/12/c-30-encourages-rubyisms/ http://haacked.com/archive/2007/05/24/ruby-like-syntax-in-c-3.0.aspx http://haacked.com/archive/2007/05/24/ruby-like-syntax-in-c-... http://blog.troyd.net/PermaLink,guid,c4d8233b-77f4-4660-91a9-8ea71cd358c7.aspx http://blog.troyd.net/PermaLink,guid,c4d8233b-77f4-4660-91a9... http://rubysource.com/c-dynamic-features-helped-me-learn-ruby/ http://rubysource.com/c-dynamic-features-helped-me-learn-rub...
ascendant 14y ago
"The rest of us" like you're some shining beacon of acceptance and awesomeness as a human being. Your statements directly contradict your message.

by nupark2 14y ago

davesims 14y ago

You're describing a sub-group of young Valley-centric developers (and the occasional outspoken charismatic CEO), drawn to Rails because of its prominence in the start-up environment. It's simple numbers: since Rails is arguably the most popular for ambitious SV companies, then sure, it's going to reflect that culture to some extent. But the community runs deeper than that, and the "Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice" world still exists and thrives. That's the majority of the Ruby and Rails world I've encountered. Again, I'm sorry your poor sampling seems to have traumatized you into an an irrational, confirmation-bias myopia, but my experience has been very different. You like C#'s language design? Me too. I especially like its adoption of Ruby-ish idioms like lambdas and the LINQ collections DSL, and the C#-on-Rails framework goodness of ASP MVC. "it's just yet another imperative scripting language with a poorly designed runtime" Sweet Lord what an ignorant statement. Here's the thing that Ruby does astonishingly well that none of those others you mentioned can do: metaprogramming. None of the languages can touch Ruby for its ability to consolidate expressive, DSL-like idioms that eliminate code duplication (and therefore bugs), increase communication and application logic clarity. This is where Ruby really eclipses everybody else, in its ability to create frameworks, DSLs and micro-solutions that drive interesting and expressive conventions that drastically reduces the time it takes to code and deliver a feature out the door. This is why frameworks like Rails and Sinatra have been so successful with polyglot programmers like the ones I work with, and why new frameworks like Merb and Padrino keep popping up and offer new idioms and expressive possibilities. It's just a creative, open language to work with, that allows a creativity and level of surprising possibilities that have real business consequences. At the application level, where code conciseness and time-to-delivery are at a premium, Ruby simply shines.

nupark2 14y ago
I strongly disagree with your statement that Ruby excels and metaprogramming and DSLs. Other languages (Scala, C#, F#, etc) with coherent type systems have demonstrated an ability to define equivalently useful DSLs with the added property of validating correctness of a declarative language at compile time. You mention LINQ as somehow deriving from Ruby -- it doesn't, it derives from set theory, relational algebra, and some very careful consideration of how to model those in a typesafe environment. You fail to mention that LINQ is type-safe, which is an enormous advantage to its use compared to traditional approaches of modeling set theory / relational data problems, and has value for things well beyond databases or querying simple data structures, eg: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609 You claim lambdas as Ruby-ish idioms, and yet totally ignore where "lambda" derives from: lambda calculus. This is not a Ruby-ism, and Ruby discards much of what is of value in lambda calculus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Lambda_calculus_and_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Lambda_calculus... Ruby is a "me too" on those fronts, and not a particularly novel one.
- davesims 14y ago
  "Ruby is a "me too" on those fronts, and not a particularly novel one." Of course. No one, especially not Matz, ever claimed Ruby was novel. Why should I care whether a language feature is new when I have features to ship? What you seem to be dogmatically, blindly ignoring is that Ruby's peculiar amalgamation of existing techniques, borrowed from (standing on the shoulders of) Smalltalk, Perl, Python, certain aspects of Lisp and others, created an expressiveness with those idioms that invited widespread adoption that Smalltalk and Lisp in all their glory only ever dreamed of. Innovation was the least of Ruby's concerns, and it's irrelevant to the conversation at hand. Type-safety seems to be a big thing for you. This may seem to be an enormous advantage to you, and I wish you well. I personally think type safety is the most overrated language feature in CS history. In my crankier moments I'd say it's essentially a compile-time unit test and refactoring/code-browsing crutch for IDE-jockeys that don't test their code. In my less-cranky moments...I'll probably say the same thing. And that's after a decade and an half in Java and C#, not quite a decade in Ruby. To me, type safety imposes far more overhead than it's worth -- generics, abstract classes, interfaces, all irrelevant and basically built-in and implicit in dynamic environments like Ruby. But that's another digression. Suffice it to say, in my entire software career I've kept track of the sum total of bugs I've fixed related to passing the wrong type to a method, or receiving a wrong type from a method, and that number, to date, is (whirring, calculating sounds): 0. Total number of times I wished I had a refactoring shortcut for "extract interface", "rename method", "introduce parameter object" in a Ruby environment: 0. I've not written a line of Scala or F#, so I can't speak to those, but the notion that C# could construct a DSL a fraction as concise and expressive as Ruby could is absurd. I like C# quite a bit, but let's not be ridiculous. And I never claimed that LINQ or C# lambdas were derived from Ruby, just that they were Ruby-ish. Clearly someone in Redmond is watching Ruby and Rails. ASP MVC directly borrows Rails idioms, and many aspects of LINQ seem to have at least had Ruby in view, like 'Select', etc., even down to using hashrockets, although in a different manner. I certainly wouldn't be the first to point these parallels out: http://nerdfortress.com/2008/06/12/c-30-encourages-rubyisms/ http://nerdfortress.com/2008/06/12/c-30-encourages-rubyisms/ http://haacked.com/archive/2007/05/24/ruby-like-syntax-in-c-3.0.aspx http://haacked.com/archive/2007/05/24/ruby-like-syntax-in-c-... http://blog.troyd.net/PermaLink,guid,c4d8233b-77f4-4660-91a9-8ea71cd358c7.aspx http://blog.troyd.net/PermaLink,guid,c4d8233b-77f4-4660-91a9... http://rubysource.com/c-dynamic-features-helped-me-learn-ruby/ http://rubysource.com/c-dynamic-features-helped-me-learn-rub...

ascendant 14y ago

"The rest of us" like you're some shining beacon of acceptance and awesomeness as a human being. Your statements directly contradict your message.