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Serious question - should I learn Ruby? I spent a little time looking at Ruby in the past. It seems like a nicely designed, clean language. However, it seems t
by randomsearch 14y ago
Serious question - should I learn Ruby?
I spent a little time looking at Ruby in the past. It seems like a nicely designed, clean language. However, it seems to me that it lost to Python in many domains. In addition, I've heard stories about Ruby having performance problems. For example, I heard Twitter rewrote their backend in Java/Scala because Ruby didn't perform well enough.
Recently I was at a Cloud Computing symposium thing attended by academics and industrial developers. No-one in the room was using Ruby for development anymore. Has it died? Is there any point learning it?
- ikailan 14y agoLearn what you want to learn, because your tools will change. Many Ruby programmers came to Ruby because of Rails. I'm part of the camp that stuck around because of JRuby for a while, but nowadays I find that I write very little Ruby and a lot more Python. Don't worry too much about what you hear about performance. If you are building a Twitter, then yes, it might matter what language you're learning. Ruby, Python, and PHP tend to be in the same ballpark in terms of performance, with each having their own warts. As of late, I've been most interested in golang.org. You can learn the basics in an afternoon at tour.golang.org.
- randomsearch 14y agoCool, thanks. Actually, Go was an alternative I was considering for my next language. More worthy than Ruby? Is it a possible Python replacement?