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Other than personal preference, are there any features that make Ruby worth considering for new apps? As a user, my experience with gems hasn't been great. I do

Other than personal preference, are there any features that make Ruby worth considering for new apps? As a user, my experience with gems hasn't been great. I don't know any Ruby, I'm just asking out of curiosity.

kingnothing 1y ago
I've used Ruby off and on since the hype train started with DHH's early videos showing how easily you can make a blog in Rails. Oof, that was published 20 years ago! I wouldn't use it for anything beyond simple shell scripts these days. You're better off with Go for back-end work.
adamors 1y ago
I’ve been writing Ruby profesionally for over a decade and while the writing has been on the wall for almost the entire time, it’s more certain than ever that Ruby is on its last legs. Big legacy companies who have invested heavily into Ruby cannot switch but every shop I’ve been at often started new services in non-Ruby (mostly Go but have seen plenty of Node/TS as well or Rust for that matter). If I were to start a new app Ruby would be far from my first choice and the biggest reason are types. After being in the weeds of big Rails apps while also working with Go/Ts/typed Python, Ruby seems very fragile in big codebases. Sorbet is also not enough.
ufmace 1y ago
Ruby by itself is still a pretty decent scripting language. I still think Rake is highly underrated as a command runner. Rails is still a good web framework within its limits. If you want to build a small, modest complexity web app with like 1 or 2 developers and under maybe 6 months of active development, modest traffic needs, etc, it's a good way to get everything up and running fast with best-practices for everything. The lack of types may start to pinch some once you get an order of magnitude more developer-months into the app than that. Lack of overall speed, threading issues, and memory usage may be an issue once you get a few orders of magnitude more traffic. But while you're within those limits, I think you'll get features out on it faster than any other language or framework. As they say, a lot more startups have died due to not being able to iterate fast enough in the early stages than from their traffic capacity, hosting efficiency, and bug count once they get into serious growth.
- gls2ro 1y ago
  > If you want to build a small, modest complexity web app with like 1 or 2 developers and under maybe 6 months of active development, modest traffic needs, etc, it's a good way to get everything up and running fast with best-practices for everything. Of course lets silently ignore Github, Gitlab, Shopify and others: all small, modest complexity web apps built with Ruby on Rails. Look at Shopify last year black friday numbers and come back and tell us how Ruby is fit only for modest traffic.
  - notepad0x90 1y ago
    But would they still build with Ruby if they had to rewrite it today? It seems other commenters are saying they wouldn't. I wanted to see if it offered anything more than my python and Go preference.
    - gls2ro 1y ago
      Let me ask you a different question: Would they be where they are today if there weren't been built at that moment with Ruby? Both these questions are hard to answer without connecting the dots, looking backward. Github was started in 2007, Shopify in 2006, Gitlab in 2011, Whop in 2021 It takes a long time approximately for a company to get out of the medium zone and go really big. So the only answer for this is we don't really know. For any programming language you can find similar stories. I tried to answer this question 6 years ago by analysing company data from YCombinator and TechStars: https://github.com/lucianghinda/programming-languages-in-startups https://github.com/lucianghinda/programming-languages-in-sta... Here is some data I found back then in 2019: - Ruby companies raised 13 Billion dollars - Python companies raised 11 billion dollars - Java companies raised 1.5 billion dollars - PHP companies raised 1.4 billion dollars - Go companies raised 1.3 billion dollars - Node.js companies raised 800 million dollars Of course this data is 6 years old and it was based on the initial programming language and also it is about funding amount and not revenue. I did not had time these days to update the data there.
      - notepad0x90 1y ago

kingnothing 1y ago

I've used Ruby off and on since the hype train started with DHH's early videos showing how easily you can make a blog in Rails. Oof, that was published 20 years ago! I wouldn't use it for anything beyond simple shell scripts these days. You're better off with Go for back-end work.

adamors 1y ago

I’ve been writing Ruby profesionally for over a decade and while the writing has been on the wall for almost the entire time, it’s more certain than ever that Ruby is on its last legs. Big legacy companies who have invested heavily into Ruby cannot switch but every shop I’ve been at often started new services in non-Ruby (mostly Go but have seen plenty of Node/TS as well or Rust for that matter). If I were to start a new app Ruby would be far from my first choice and the biggest reason are types. After being in the weeds of big Rails apps while also working with Go/Ts/typed Python, Ruby seems very fragile in big codebases. Sorbet is also not enough.

ufmace 1y ago

Ruby by itself is still a pretty decent scripting language. I still think Rake is highly underrated as a command runner. Rails is still a good web framework within its limits. If you want to build a small, modest complexity web app with like 1 or 2 developers and under maybe 6 months of active development, modest traffic needs, etc, it's a good way to get everything up and running fast with best-practices for everything. The lack of types may start to pinch some once you get an order of magnitude more developer-months into the app than that. Lack of overall speed, threading issues, and memory usage may be an issue once you get a few orders of magnitude more traffic. But while you're within those limits, I think you'll get features out on it faster than any other language or framework. As they say, a lot more startups have died due to not being able to iterate fast enough in the early stages than from their traffic capacity, hosting efficiency, and bug count once they get into serious growth.

gls2ro 1y ago
> If you want to build a small, modest complexity web app with like 1 or 2 developers and under maybe 6 months of active development, modest traffic needs, etc, it's a good way to get everything up and running fast with best-practices for everything. Of course lets silently ignore Github, Gitlab, Shopify and others: all small, modest complexity web apps built with Ruby on Rails. Look at Shopify last year black friday numbers and come back and tell us how Ruby is fit only for modest traffic.
- notepad0x90 1y ago
  But would they still build with Ruby if they had to rewrite it today? It seems other commenters are saying they wouldn't. I wanted to see if it offered anything more than my python and Go preference.
  - gls2ro 1y ago
    Let me ask you a different question: Would they be where they are today if there weren't been built at that moment with Ruby? Both these questions are hard to answer without connecting the dots, looking backward. Github was started in 2007, Shopify in 2006, Gitlab in 2011, Whop in 2021 It takes a long time approximately for a company to get out of the medium zone and go really big. So the only answer for this is we don't really know. For any programming language you can find similar stories. I tried to answer this question 6 years ago by analysing company data from YCombinator and TechStars: https://github.com/lucianghinda/programming-languages-in-startups https://github.com/lucianghinda/programming-languages-in-sta... Here is some data I found back then in 2019: - Ruby companies raised 13 Billion dollars - Python companies raised 11 billion dollars - Java companies raised 1.5 billion dollars - PHP companies raised 1.4 billion dollars - Go companies raised 1.3 billion dollars - Node.js companies raised 800 million dollars Of course this data is 6 years old and it was based on the initial programming language and also it is about funding amount and not revenue. I did not had time these days to update the data there.
    - notepad0x90 1y ago