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The web developers have taken over, it seems. Edit: I say this as a web developer. I feel like it's often forgotten that Ruby and Javascript aren't the only la

The web developers have taken over, it seems. Edit: I say this as a web developer. I feel like it's often forgotten that Ruby and Javascript aren't the only languages worth using.

camus 13y ago
Scala for the win. Most of the ruby goodness with non of the performance problems (at high scale (ie Twitter ...), because ruby is fine for most use cases ). Go is fine, but i dont like the syntax and some of the language design choices
pjmlp 13y ago
Well, I never used Ruby, besides to see what this Ruby on Rails was all about and I already knew Python since the version 1 days. For me the only place for JavaScript is on the browser. For anything else, there are endless languages to choose from.
- seiji 13y ago
  For anything else, there are endless languages to choose from. The Americans have taken over and the Americans have, based on their own linguistic experience, decided most people can only handle one spoken language and one programming language. For some of us, we can handle six programming languages and be fine. For "average" people, they're lucky to get one programming language, so it was decided to fad-hype-hipster promote One Language To Rule Them All for fronted, backend, sideend, middleware, topware, bottomware, programming your embedded system, programming your car, scripting your operating system, and programming your blender. Look on github for how many people write shell scripts in ruby because they don't know how bash works. You can find the same over-syntax'd-programming-environment-as-shell-script with node too. We're the exceptions. They can't handle the truth.
  - anuragramdasan 13y ago
    >> lucky to get one programming language to get? I'm not sure what that means.
    - seiji 13y ago
      get, grock, understand, comprehend, become one with "I don't get why people live on geologically mapped flood plains."
      - anuragramdasan 13y ago
        Ah damn. My bad. Seeing this in Javascript has sort of disoriented me.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Very well said. > Look on github for how many people write shell scripts in ruby because they don't know how bash works. I have seen this happen in a company I used to work for, when new system engineers came on board, but in this case it was Groovy.
  - mbillie1 13y ago
    > Look on github for how many people write shell scripts in ruby because they don't know how bash works. You can find the same over-syntax'd-programming-environment-as-shell-script with node too. We're the exceptions. They can't handle the truth. As someone who has done this (and who currently works in C), I will say only that shell scripts translated to Ruby can be a lot easier to read and maintain than those written in bash... if I get to the point where I'm having to pipe to more than two of awk/sed/grep I will generally just write it in Ruby, because then my mother could read it. YMMV though. In every other sense I agree with you entirely, and I think the proliferation of JS rewrites of things that work in actually-designed languages is appalling.
    - seiji 13y ago
      You found the one exception. There's a fuzzy line when dealing with shell scripts. If you're just iterating over a directory and checking some files, that's great shell script territory. If you're making a launcher script for another program to set the environment, check directories, fix permissions, and run pre-flight checks, that's great for shell script. But, sometimes we end up with feature creep. You start out with "Well, this shell script just has to parse some CSV and insert into sqlite" then before you know it, it also has to check another pre-existing DB for redundancy checks or constraints, then you're 100 pages into the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide trying to make Bash do something that would be a six liner in Perl 4. The benefits of over-programming bash scripts is extensive portability though (if you make sure you aren't using features only in very late version of the shell).
      - kbenson 13y ago
        Except if by portability you include non-unix systems. Then you're probably better off with Perl (for example) again.
      - planckscnst 13y ago
        > If you're just iterating over a directory and checking some files Unfortunately, I very frequently see this in shell scripts... ls $SOME_PATH | awk... I even once saw someone use ls to figure out if a certain file was a symlink by looking for "->"! That kind of stuff doesn't typically happen in other languages.
- jophde 13y ago
  @seiji Average programmers aren't working on shell scripts, client side code, and server side code at the same time.
  - scrabble 13y ago
    Are you sure about that? Everyone on my team does. I can't really imagine not being able to build the full stack.
  - zxcdw 13y ago
    And everyone is better than the average. :) Honestly, HN too has hordes of people who can't write FizzBuzz. No reason to feel elitist for anybody really.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      FizzBuzz seems to be an American thing. I have been coding since 1986 and only learned about it via the usual HN hiring discussions.
      - jeremiep 13y ago
        Most programmers never heard of Fizzbuzz, the point of it is merely to screen out candidates who can't come up with their own solutions to problems. A lot of so-called experts aren't capable of doing more than copy other people's solutions. Fizzbuzz offers a simple but new problem for candidates to solve.

The web developers have taken over, it seems. Edit: I say this as a web developer. I feel like it's often forgotten that Ruby and Javascript aren't the only languages worth using.

camus 13y ago

Scala for the win. Most of the ruby goodness with non of the performance problems (at high scale (ie Twitter ...), because ruby is fine for most use cases ). Go is fine, but i dont like the syntax and some of the language design choices

pjmlp 13y ago

Well, I never used Ruby, besides to see what this Ruby on Rails was all about and I already knew Python since the version 1 days. For me the only place for JavaScript is on the browser. For anything else, there are endless languages to choose from.

seiji 13y ago
For anything else, there are endless languages to choose from. The Americans have taken over and the Americans have, based on their own linguistic experience, decided most people can only handle one spoken language and one programming language. For some of us, we can handle six programming languages and be fine. For "average" people, they're lucky to get one programming language, so it was decided to fad-hype-hipster promote One Language To Rule Them All for fronted, backend, sideend, middleware, topware, bottomware, programming your embedded system, programming your car, scripting your operating system, and programming your blender. Look on github for how many people write shell scripts in ruby because they don't know how bash works. You can find the same over-syntax'd-programming-environment-as-shell-script with node too. We're the exceptions. They can't handle the truth.
- anuragramdasan 13y ago
  >> lucky to get one programming language to get? I'm not sure what that means.
  - seiji 13y ago
    get, grock, understand, comprehend, become one with "I don't get why people live on geologically mapped flood plains."
    - anuragramdasan 13y ago
      Ah damn. My bad. Seeing this in Javascript has sort of disoriented me.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Very well said. > Look on github for how many people write shell scripts in ruby because they don't know how bash works. I have seen this happen in a company I used to work for, when new system engineers came on board, but in this case it was Groovy.
- mbillie1 13y ago
  > Look on github for how many people write shell scripts in ruby because they don't know how bash works. You can find the same over-syntax'd-programming-environment-as-shell-script with node too. We're the exceptions. They can't handle the truth. As someone who has done this (and who currently works in C), I will say only that shell scripts translated to Ruby can be a lot easier to read and maintain than those written in bash... if I get to the point where I'm having to pipe to more than two of awk/sed/grep I will generally just write it in Ruby, because then my mother could read it. YMMV though. In every other sense I agree with you entirely, and I think the proliferation of JS rewrites of things that work in actually-designed languages is appalling.
  - seiji 13y ago
    You found the one exception. There's a fuzzy line when dealing with shell scripts. If you're just iterating over a directory and checking some files, that's great shell script territory. If you're making a launcher script for another program to set the environment, check directories, fix permissions, and run pre-flight checks, that's great for shell script. But, sometimes we end up with feature creep. You start out with "Well, this shell script just has to parse some CSV and insert into sqlite" then before you know it, it also has to check another pre-existing DB for redundancy checks or constraints, then you're 100 pages into the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide trying to make Bash do something that would be a six liner in Perl 4. The benefits of over-programming bash scripts is extensive portability though (if you make sure you aren't using features only in very late version of the shell).
    - kbenson 13y ago
      Except if by portability you include non-unix systems. Then you're probably better off with Perl (for example) again.
    - planckscnst 13y ago
      > If you're just iterating over a directory and checking some files Unfortunately, I very frequently see this in shell scripts... ls $SOME_PATH | awk... I even once saw someone use ls to figure out if a certain file was a symlink by looking for "->"! That kind of stuff doesn't typically happen in other languages.
jophde 13y ago
@seiji Average programmers aren't working on shell scripts, client side code, and server side code at the same time.
- scrabble 13y ago
  Are you sure about that? Everyone on my team does. I can't really imagine not being able to build the full stack.
- zxcdw 13y ago
  And everyone is better than the average. :) Honestly, HN too has hordes of people who can't write FizzBuzz. No reason to feel elitist for anybody really.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    FizzBuzz seems to be an American thing. I have been coding since 1986 and only learned about it via the usual HN hiring discussions.
    - jeremiep 13y ago
      Most programmers never heard of Fizzbuzz, the point of it is merely to screen out candidates who can't come up with their own solutions to problems. A lot of so-called experts aren't capable of doing more than copy other people's solutions. Fizzbuzz offers a simple but new problem for candidates to solve.