5 ms·

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

BirAdam 4mo ago
Why go halfway with Rust when you could just pick Ada SPARK? Seems like an arbitrary choice based off of rationalizing a trend.
- firesteelrain 4mo ago
  Because you pick Ada Spark if are in a certification heavy environment like Aerospace.
- pelagicAustral 4mo ago
  I feel like your comment is a bit tongue in cheek and i am going to take it at face value, but I honestly been feeling increasingly more like doing verbatim what you're suggesting and i dont have a very solid justification for it.
  - BirAdam 4mo ago
    I meant it honestly. What excuse do people have to choose anything other than mission critical technologies if the AI system can do most of the heavy lifting? Why should we settle for anything less than five 9s of uptime?
lfx 4mo ago
I understand why rust, but why TS? just for a front end?
- mdavidn 4mo ago
  Compiler errors help the chatbot find and fix problems. The equivalent in Ruby, RBS, isn't as widely adopted. Type annotations being in separate files is also inconvenient. https://github.com/ruby/rbs https://github.com/ruby/rbs
blacksmith_tb 4mo ago
That seems like it would depend quite a bit on the project? I would think many nonprofits would want a webapp of some flavor, and Ruby (or Python) are still not bad choices there - my experience with Claude is that it handles Ruby well.
throwaway613746 4mo ago
[dead]
m12k 4mo ago
The typescript team themselves rewrote the compiler in Go to get better use of coding agents.
- hoten 4mo ago
  They started that migration years ago. I don't remember them citing agentic coding as a reason. Do you have a source?
  - lexoj 4mo ago
    Not sure about the compiler but prominent users of llm agents (Mitchel Hashimoto, Armin Ronacher etc) has mentioned that Go gives better results for agentic coding.
- franz899 4mo ago
  They did it for speed, and Go was the language with the closest syntax to migrate to.
graboid 4mo ago
I feel for a smallish project I'd rather prefer to have more readable, dense code like Ruby's over the ceremony of static types.
- QuantumNomad_ 4mo ago
  There is almost no ceremony involved in dealing with types in Rust. And what little there is, is worth it ten-fold for all of the runtime bug headaches that you avoid compared to dynamically typed languages.
  - wasmperson 4mo ago
    Specifically addressing the "almost no ceremony" claim and not the "totally worth it" claim: JS: let person_1 = { }; let person_2 = { parent: person_1 }; person_1.child = person_2; Rust: use std::cell::Cell; struct Person<'a> { parent: Option<&'a Person<'a>>, child: Cell<Option<&'a Person<'a>>> } let person_1 = Person { parent: None, child: Cell::new(None) }; let person_2 = Person { parent: Some(&person_1), child: Cell::new(None) }; person_1.child.set(Some(&person_2)); And that's before we start talking about function signatures and traits.
jazzyjackson 4mo ago
I’m downvoting because this is basically bait without any contribution as to why you feel that way, but personally I vibe coded a very successful result by iterating a rails app and then crawling the entire site into static files (~144,000 product pages and category pages) and then stashing them all in a bucket on cloudflare free tier. I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.
compumike 4mo ago
You can cheaply and readably give a lot of clues to both agents and humans with some assertions at the start of a method: raise ArgumentError.new("...") unless ... which can include type assertions but also a lot more. The agents seem to do well with this. I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.
vidarh 4mo ago
Agents handle Ruby just fine. I used to have to give them some stern rules about avoiding instance_variable_get etc. instead of adding accessors, but those problems have pretty much vanished in the last 6 months. I like using Ruby with agents because the code remains short and readable.
tjpnz 4mo ago
Agentic coding is not a given anywhere.

I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.

BirAdam 4mo ago

Why go halfway with Rust when you could just pick Ada SPARK? Seems like an arbitrary choice based off of rationalizing a trend.

firesteelrain 4mo ago
Because you pick Ada Spark if are in a certification heavy environment like Aerospace.
pelagicAustral 4mo ago
I feel like your comment is a bit tongue in cheek and i am going to take it at face value, but I honestly been feeling increasingly more like doing verbatim what you're suggesting and i dont have a very solid justification for it.
- BirAdam 4mo ago
  I meant it honestly. What excuse do people have to choose anything other than mission critical technologies if the AI system can do most of the heavy lifting? Why should we settle for anything less than five 9s of uptime?

lfx 4mo ago

I understand why rust, but why TS? just for a front end?

mdavidn 4mo ago
Compiler errors help the chatbot find and fix problems. The equivalent in Ruby, RBS, isn't as widely adopted. Type annotations being in separate files is also inconvenient. https://github.com/ruby/rbs https://github.com/ruby/rbs

blacksmith_tb 4mo ago

That seems like it would depend quite a bit on the project? I would think many nonprofits would want a webapp of some flavor, and Ruby (or Python) are still not bad choices there - my experience with Claude is that it handles Ruby well.

throwaway613746 4mo ago

[dead]

m12k 4mo ago

The typescript team themselves rewrote the compiler in Go to get better use of coding agents.

hoten 4mo ago
They started that migration years ago. I don't remember them citing agentic coding as a reason. Do you have a source?
- lexoj 4mo ago
  Not sure about the compiler but prominent users of llm agents (Mitchel Hashimoto, Armin Ronacher etc) has mentioned that Go gives better results for agentic coding.
franz899 4mo ago
They did it for speed, and Go was the language with the closest syntax to migrate to.

graboid 4mo ago

I feel for a smallish project I'd rather prefer to have more readable, dense code like Ruby's over the ceremony of static types.

QuantumNomad_ 4mo ago
There is almost no ceremony involved in dealing with types in Rust. And what little there is, is worth it ten-fold for all of the runtime bug headaches that you avoid compared to dynamically typed languages.
- wasmperson 4mo ago
  Specifically addressing the "almost no ceremony" claim and not the "totally worth it" claim: JS: let person_1 = { }; let person_2 = { parent: person_1 }; person_1.child = person_2; Rust: use std::cell::Cell; struct Person<'a> { parent: Option<&'a Person<'a>>, child: Cell<Option<&'a Person<'a>>> } let person_1 = Person { parent: None, child: Cell::new(None) }; let person_2 = Person { parent: Some(&person_1), child: Cell::new(None) }; person_1.child.set(Some(&person_2)); And that's before we start talking about function signatures and traits.

jazzyjackson 4mo ago

I’m downvoting because this is basically bait without any contribution as to why you feel that way, but personally I vibe coded a very successful result by iterating a rails app and then crawling the entire site into static files (~144,000 product pages and category pages) and then stashing them all in a bucket on cloudflare free tier. I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.

compumike 4mo ago

You can cheaply and readably give a lot of clues to both agents and humans with some assertions at the start of a method: raise ArgumentError.new("...") unless ... which can include type assertions but also a lot more. The agents seem to do well with this. I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.

vidarh 4mo ago

Agents handle Ruby just fine. I used to have to give them some stern rules about avoiding instance_variable_get etc. instead of adding accessors, but those problems have pretty much vanished in the last 6 months. I like using Ruby with agents because the code remains short and readable.

tjpnz 4mo ago

Agentic coding is not a given anywhere.