13 ms·

Introducing Rubinius X

153 points by yannski 13y ago

al2o3cr 13y ago
Similarly, C and Java are dying since nobody touts their use of them in PR materials. Also Postgres and HTTP. /snark Technology hipsterism != technology vitality.
- wil421 13y ago
  But my start up isn't cool if we aren't using the newest and greatest buzzword technologies.
- d0m 13y ago
  It depends of the language I suppose. Ruby was all about being new, cool and fun. Call that hipsterism if you want. But now that people moved on, it's fair to ask ourselves "Who is going to use Ruby for their next project?". Big company? No. Hipsters? No. You? Maybe : )
  - jmagoon 13y ago
    I work at a big company and we use ruby all the time. It's a powerful scripting language that we can rapidly develop in for the 1000s (literally) of small programs that need to work with our legacy unix systems.
  - jmagoon 13y ago
    I work at a big company and we use ruby all the time. It's a powerful scripting language that we can rapidly develop in for the 1000s (literally) of small programs that need to work with our legacy unix systems.
dcu 13y ago
...until people realize the mess that is node.js. I would rather say Rails is dying because it no longer fits the new web programming paradigms.
- girvo 13y ago
  So very much this. I never really learnt Rails, to be honest. I dabbled, but never got fully into it. The thing is, the way I'm writing web apps now (nice API's over straight classes, composable libraries, and a routing layer over the top to give it a REST interface) doesn't fit my mental model of how Rails works. Similarly, I've somewhat abandoned "MVC" for web-apps. Nice API's with the ability to have any front-end, not kicking out HTML from my framework, and the like -- that's what I'm doing now. Don't get me wrong -- I know that Rails (especially 4) can do all this as well. Heck, there's not much stopping me from doing what I'm doing here with straight Ruby, a couple of libraries and Sinatra (I have a good friend who does exactly that). But for some reason, I've instead written off ruby entirely for that use-case. I'm merely the n=1 here though, and as a non-ruby programmer, my opinion doesn't mean much I guess. But I find it curious how I ended up skipping it.
  - jalopy 13y ago
    Interesting, as that's very much how my mental model of how Rails works: 1. The routing layer is all about declaring a resource which gives you all 7 major REST operations, and 2. there's a nice facility for responding_to any data format (html, json, js, text, etc) you want. With rails scaffolding, you can pretty much get all boilerplate code written for you, and have it very simply implement a REST backend for a more "heavyweight" javascript framework (angular, ember, etc). I wonder if the issue is that rails didn't originally start out this way, and now people assume that Rails is stuck in the past? I think the article gets it right in that Ruby needs better concurrency primitives (promises are a nice idea), and esp better performance. If Javascript can be as fast as it is with V8, there should be nothing stopping Ruby from achieving similar levels of performance.
    - girvo 13y ago
      > I wonder if the issue is that rails didn't originally start out this way, and now people assume that Rails is stuck in the past? I don't think I got it across in my post correctly, but that's basically what I was trying to say, yeah! I even _know_ that I have that cognitive bias, and yet it remains. I even tried to pick up Rails 4 last week, and put it back down rather quickly again.
yannski 13y ago
The post contains lots of contradictory facts. First, some people (not all) are using other tools than Ruby. They are looking for a solution to their problems. IMHO Ruby is not even present in the discussion when people make their choices. But Rails is. So I'm not sure that modernizing Ruby is sufficient. Building a modern framework around it could be though. I mean, people go to NodeJS because of Node, not because of Javascript...
- the_watcher 13y ago
  >>But Rails is I was about to mention this. I know of at least two (very) hot S13 YC companies that either built their web app in Rails or explicitly deal with Rails (not sure if One Month Rails is built in Rails or not, but it is pretty explicitly pro-Rails). Does Rails prevalence preclude Ruby from being a dying language? Depends on what you mean by dying. The dominance of Rails is probably something of a blessing and a curse for the broader Ruby world. I'm too new to it to have a strong position, but I will say that as a novice developer, I went with Ruby and Rails because there is a fantastic suite of tools for learning from scratch.
  - Mikeb85 13y ago
    Rails is a curse. Because of it, Ruby (which is a fantastic language) has been reduced to a web language, when it's really much more than that.
    - jaredonline 13y ago
      Ruby was a little-known project before Rails came along. Without Rails, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
    - the_watcher 13y ago
      I never would have been exposed to Ruby if not for Rails (I'm a novice, self taught developer). While everyone talks about how amazing Scala and Haskell are (of which I have no doubt), I learned Ruby because Rails allowed me to build little projects (usually web apps) very easily. Now I have branched out into a bit of node.JS, some Python, and some Clojure (I like the idea of learning a Lisp), but Rails was a friendly entry point.
bencollier49 13y ago
"The few exceptions prove the rule". I don't think this means what he thinks it means.
- neals 13y ago
  Just a few of my cats are male. This proves that all my cats are female. Right?
- randomknowledge 13y ago
  The most charitable interpretation of the claim I could think of was that the author meant the few exceptions illustrate why the other companies are moving away from ruby.
- bronson 13y ago
  It's just another hand-waved argument in the whole confused post. If the dude's approach to code matches his approach to writing then we have nothing to worry about.
- talkingquickly 13y ago
  Agreed, I think the author has mis-understood what it means. Quite a common one to get wrong though, for anyone wondering it generally means that stating an exception proves/ establishes/ implies that a general rule exists. E.g. You may not play ball in the park within 20 metres of the road implies that the general rules is that you can play ball elsewhere in the park. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
- thenonsequitur 13y ago
  I think he's taking as axiomatic that there only a few people using ruby, thus claiming this demonstrates the general rule people don't use ruby. Thus he is, in fact, using the phrase correctly. But by taking it as axiomatic that few people use ruby, he is begging the question.
notwedtm 13y ago
Um, wut? This post is so confusing. I see some half thought out ideas, but no solutions. Ruby may not be Java or JavaScript, but why would you want it to be? You have Java and JavaScript for times when you want to use Java or JavaScript. Use the right tool for the job.
davidw 13y ago
No, Ruby died last month, but now it's cool again in a retro sort of way. Node.js is what's dying this week. Next month, Tcl is going to make a comeback.
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  Oh God, I certainly hope so.
  - girvo 13y ago
    Everything is a string! Seriously, I don't mind Tcl at all. Does that make me crazy?
    - smrtinsert 13y ago
      No tcl is nice. It's expressive and functional. I love not having to use the shift key every two characters for expressions. upvar/uplevel are awesome for creating new language contructs and meta programming. People ditched it because it wasn't cool, but it got the job done and remains useful and succinct.
      - loup-vaillant 13y ago
        > I love not having to use the shift key every two characters for expressions. Just customize your keyboard layout, and reverse shift behaviour for the number row. There, better symbol access.
    - davidw 13y ago
      Actually, internally, everything is not a string, and has not been that way since... 10+ years. Everything is representable as a string, though. I actually like Tcl quite a bit even if I don't use it much these days: http://www.amazon.com/Tcl-Toolkit-2nd-John-Ousterhout/dp/032133633X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381852799&sr=1-1&keywords=tcl+and+the+tk+toolkit&tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/Tcl-Toolkit-2nd-John-Ousterhout/dp/032... (See the cover for all of the authors' names :-)
Mikeb85 13y ago
Rails is dying. Ruby isn't. It just isn't as popular amongst hipster web programmers anymore... There's some very interesting things going on in the non-Rails and non-web framework Ruby world...
- the_watcher 13y ago
  What is the evidence that Rails is dying? The programming bootcamp movement is primarily Rails-based, One Month Rails just came out of YC, and I know of at least one other S13 YC company who built their web app in Rails. What seems to have changed is that not every startup is being built with Rails anymore, which I'd say is a positive thing that does not mean Rails is dying.
  - Mikeb85 13y ago
    The hype is dying. I also think the web is moving beyond the Rails model...
    - randomdata 13y ago
      The hype is definitely dying, as it should. Rails is just months shy of being 10 years old. I find it kind of amazing that using Rails was even newsworthy within the past couple of years, given how long it has been in use. A startup choosing Rails to power their application today is like a startup choosing Linux to power their servers. It is not something worth reporting. It doesn't necessarily mean the usage is in decline though.
    - the_watcher 13y ago
      That's a good thing, right? Rails is a great tool for the projects that it should be used for. It should be picked on merits, not on hype.
- peteratt 13y ago
  Totally agree with your point. Though it might seem that Rails has scaling problems and is regarded as slow and painful once the system matures, there are many many other applications to the language in itself. Plus, there's a lot to be done on the performance side of things. Ruby compilers have come a long way, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. Just look at Puppet. It is so awesome, and it's implemented in Ruby. Ruby is definitely growing like a weed among the devops community.
rhapsodyv 13y ago
The post doesn't point to any data proving the point. I'm curios from where he had concluded that ruby is dying...
- yannski 13y ago
  From his media trainer, certainly...
  - kookster 13y ago
    +1 this: sensational headline = controversy = hackernews frontpage
- eric970 13y ago
  You don't need data to back up bold claims when your ego is the size of a watermelon.
beat 13y ago
Businesses (meaning Big Business, I suppose) don't reject Ruby because it's "a dying language". They reject it because they're inherently conservative. Java and .Net rule the roost because they're seen as safe, respectable choices. The appearance of risk is more important to most businesses than actual risk. Ruby isn't dominant, therefore it is perceived as risky. Java's complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project, but it's not "risky" because it's dominant.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  Java and .NET are also backed by ginormous corporations (Oracle and Microsoft), which big business also generally views as a major risk-mitigating factor. (It isn't really -- in fact it's the opposite, "corporate" platforms tend to die out faster than open-source ones, at least in my experience -- but they think it is, which in this discussion is all that matters.)
  - klaustopher 13y ago
    Also, let's not forget about IBM, HP, RedHat and all the other shops that back Java
    - Xylakant 13y ago
      to be just here: RedHat also backs jruby.
      - Argorak 13y ago
        Heck, RedHat even has a big JRuby Application Server on top of JBoss. http://torquebox.org/ http://torquebox.org/
  - xs_kid 13y ago
    Oracle has some JRuby apps on production
  - pnathan 13y ago
gesman 13y ago
Lets face it - Ruby is a great language and wrapped with Rails it allows to craft napkin idea to working, real-world prototype in record short amount of time. These capabilities prove to be golden for Silicon Valley startups where speed of execution means difference between life and death (VC or nothing). Once done - startups are praying for a quick exit until the issues of gems mess, scaling, performance and deployment nightmares start raising their ugly heads and requires ample continuous investments in administration and management talents to keep things afloat. Serious multi-billion enterprises need performance, guarantees of commercial support from big vendor, speed of compiled languages and cannot afford to use interpreted languages and have their feet stuck in all that swamp. Hence they use Java and dot NET. That's a fact of life.
- lectrick 13y ago
  Given that you will have to figure out scaling issues eventually anyway, the speed of compiled languages should NOT be weighed heavier than programming ease in your decisionmaking. Programmer time is FAR more expensive than hardware these days.
  - free652 13y ago
    Actually it matters a lot. Since when the programmers manage servers? More servers = more people managing them. And if for a compiled language you need 2 data centers for Ruby you need 20... And level 4 data centers are expensive. Ruby is great at what it does. I don't see Node.js replacing it anytime soon. But Ruby won't be in enterprise anytime soon also.
  - gesman 13y ago
    Throwing money in hardware to compensate for chosen framework's sluggishness doesn't seems to run well with people who sign the checks.
    - outside1234 13y ago
      Neither does buying extra programmers.
kookster 13y ago
Many Rails folks have moved on to other things, many of them to Node.js, and in general development is becoming less homogenous (i.e. Go services interacting with a Rails app/middleware, and an Angular.js front-end). This is a good thing; we are seeing people more willing to use the right tool for the job rather than trying to use one language for everything.
- jwarzech 13y ago
  This. I think of any of the comments so far you express what I'm seeing as well (I know 'use case of 1'). Distributed & modularized apps where each component uses the language/framework best suited for the job.
eric970 13y ago
[rant] If you're going to claim that your strong opinions are facts, please treat them as such and give citations or back them up yourself. [/rant] Ruby is not my favorite language anymore, but I still use it and see evidence that there is a huge place it fills in the dev community and ecosystem. I have never used a more expressive language. I'm stating this as a fact from what I have experienced, and I'm giving points that back it up. There are dozens of actively maintained Ruby projects, some of which are the most popular repos on GitHub. I don't see any evidence that the Ruby ecosystem is on a downward trend of activity and is "dying", so I have no reason to think otherwise. This kind of stuff reminds me why I take breaks from HackerNews every once in a while -_- Yuck.
lectrick 13y ago
If you love a tool, it won't die. Period. And lots of people (myself included) still love Ruby. And I finally released a potentially useful gem for medium to large Ruby/Rails codebases. Are unmitigated monkeypatches complexifying your codebase to the point of pain? I wrote a gem to help manage that... https://github.com/pmarreck/pachinko https://github.com/pmarreck/pachinko
starrhorne 13y ago
There are 20-30 ruby conferences every year in the US alone. I've been to about 7. They all had > 200 attendees. Even the less-known ones tend to sell out well in advance. Freelance rates for ruby developers are crazy-high. In Seattle, at least, I'm seeing $200/hr as not uncommon. And on a side note, PHP has been around for about 80 years now and it's still moving along. So I don't think ruby/rails are going to "die" any time soon.
- jaredonline 13y ago
  Thank you for being the first comment (I've seen) that actually looks at some amount of data. It's hard to read "most Rails people are moving on", "Rails and Ruby don't find the new web model" and "node.js is replacing Ruby" over and over without anyone saying how they're coming to their conclusions. My thoughts are the same as yours... Ruby and/or Rails aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Just think, Rails powers the site that stores most startups code. It may not be as shiny and new as it was, but there's still a lot of usage.
- bybjorn 13y ago
  More like 20 years, but yeah, I guess 20 Internet Years equals around 80 standard years..
  - thenonsequitur 13y ago
    Interestingly, Ruby is also approaching its 20-year anniversary. Of course, PHP has been popular much longer than Ruby.
- reuven 13y ago
  Yes, exactly. If Ruby is dying, then why are Ruby conferences popping up everywhere? Why are Ruby developers in desperately short supply? I live in Israel, where Ruby has taken a while to make inroads. But we just had a conference last week, and the many attendees were super excited about the language. And companies were desperate to find employees who know Ruby and/or Rails. Indeed, the biggest reason that I've found companies give for avoiding the use of Ruby is the scarcity of experienced developers. A client of mine switched from Ruby to PHP last year, simply because he could easily find PHP programmers, and they cost a lot less. You could argue that this points to companies leaving Ruby, but in many ways, I'd say that it rather indicates Ruby is a victim of its own success. Even if Ruby is dying (which I don't think is the case), plenty of seemingly dead languages are still in demand, and are used on all sorts of projects. You can command great consulting rates in COBOL, today, if you want. Both Ruby and Rails have strong, active communities that are pushing the language and framework forward in all sorts of interesting ways. The key to a successful open-source project is the community, so I'm pretty confident that I'll be working in Ruby for at least a few more years. But hey, if the author wants to work in something else, power to him; we're fortunate to be living in an era of many high-quality, open-source languages.
adamkittelson 13y ago
This post really needed to follow up on the whole "Ruby is dying" part with some sort of "and here's how Rubinius X can help" part. The way it's written has caused everyone here to debate whether or not Ruby is dying and completely ignore the announcement. I'm sure the title of the HN link isn't helping either.
- regularfry 13y ago
  That would be in the first link.
otikik 13y ago
http://x.rubini.us/ http://x.rubini.us/ I like everything I read there except undefined. I have been using Lua for a while now and having only two falsy values is great. I am not convinced adding a third is a good trade-off.
static_typed 13y ago
Ruby is not dead, it just smells that way. Seriously though, it's demise is a little overstated - the BBC for one use it quite a bit, as do quite a few startups. The author of the post seems a bit butthurt that Ruby has not surplanted all other technologies - and it never will. One big problem is that for most businesses their first and perhaps last taste of Ruby comes from Rails, and it's security fails. That is a shame. Having been burnt by the failed promises of Rails ourselves, our company moved onto Python, and never looked back. Also, Ruby is just one tool in the kit, fine for some jobs, patently unsuitable for many others. The evangelists should realise this, and not do a disservice to Ruby by trying to shove it into every place and frankly pissing off potential future adopters of that technology.
thinkpad20 13y ago
A baseless, attention-grabbing headline, a vague language spec that doesn't really seem to be adding any new ideas (and indeed rejecting some good ones), and no actual working code. Get back to me when you actually write something; until then all this is is a glorified blog post with a "wouldn't it be nice if there were ____ language out there?"
dasil003 13y ago
The hyperbole is undermining the point.
27182818284 13y ago
It has definitely lost the cool edge that it had. In the midwestern US, it takes longer for trends to penetrate and I saw the Ruby height in popularity here after it had been eating Hacker News alive for a while. Now out here, it is definitely Node.js. All the new young developers talk about it. The old PHP devs in town talk about it, but can't switch to it because all of their libraries and business is in PHP, etc. Interestingly enough, event-loop non-blocking, etc is NEVER the reason mentioned by the devs interested in it and using it. They only mention how nice it is to have basically the same language in the frontend and backend. They claim not having your brain switch like that is a huge benefit (which I could believe, but I haven't tried. (Python+Django+Flask dev myself))
SmileyKeith 13y ago
Ruby just seems to be actually getting used by large projects. I personally think that makes sense because you want to see that a language can stand some sort of test of time before entirely adopting it. I think what Jeff Atwood had to say about it [1] when choosing to use it for Discourse [2] shows a different opinion that this article. One that I agree with more. [1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html [2]: http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/
- smacktoward 13y ago
  Atwood's argument boils down to "I wanted to work with this one guy, and what he uses is Ruby." Which is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't really say much about the popularity of the language among programmers in general.
cromwellian 13y ago
I'm going to lose a lot of karma of this one, but here we go. The organizations I know of that have switched from Ruby to Java have done so for the following reasons: 1) Performance. The JVM simply scales better, it is more cost effective in the datacenter. Without mentioning names, I know of significant Silicon Valley darlings that spent huge sums trying to scale Ruby, got crushed, and eventually ripped-and-replaced the backends with Java. 2) Skill Availability. There are 7+ million Java programmers, it is easier to hire Java programmers. 3) Tool Availability and Maturity. I think Ruby is a fine language, but I see it like PHP, great for rapid prototyping and productivity in the small, but it's version 1 for the lean startup or for the corporate departmental app. Version 2 is Java, C#, etc using the UX and product feature lessons learned from the Ruby prototype. IMHO, Node.js is the new Ruby. It has the benefit of having the same language on the client and the server, but once again, it's going to run into similar scalability issues when large organizations try to use it. I think we're going to run into the same issues, of it becoming a cool bandwagon, the platform being stretched to its breaking point, followed by the realization that there are serious problems.
- tonyedgecombe 13y ago
  I think a bigger change is the JVM and .Net don't suck so much now. There are interesting languages like Scala and Groovy on the JVM and frameworks like Play and MVC on .Net that make development less painful.
  - danieldk 13y ago
    I think a bigger change is the JVM and .Net don't suck so much now. Frankly, JVM hasn't really sucked since it got a JIT compiler (J2SE 1.2, 1998) or if you prefer the switch to HotSpot as the default VM (J2SE 1.3, 2000).
- blueblob 13y ago
  I guess JRuby is trying to address the first point and they wouldn't have to retrain their staff. I don't know how popular JRuby is but it runs on the JVM.
- 13y ago
bradleyland 13y ago
I'm kind of disappointed in the way the author is approaching the launch of Rubinius X. The "death of Ruby" is being used as a rhetorical device. The strategy appears to be that if we all believe that Ruby is actually dying, we're more likely to get behind Rubinius X. Unfortunately, no support is provided for this claim. Rubinius has always been the Ruby that placed purity before pragmatism. I applaud them for that, but putting forth the assertion that Ruby is dying as a means to drum up support for a new generation of Ruby seems like getting off on the wrong foot.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Ruby does seem to be, if not dying, at least losing a lot of the buzz it had a few years back, but mostly that seems to be because Rails has lost the buzz it had, and much of Ruby's buzz was actually not Ruby buzz, but Rails buzz. That being said, I think the vision Rubinius X has about where Ruby should go is great -- both in terms of language features and conventions -- and I think that besides the specific details, the high-level strategic vision is something Ruby needs.
  - habitue 13y ago
    It is suspicious though that the Rubinius project just lost funding from Engine Yard, and now (like a week later?) the maintainer has declared Ruby dead and Rubinius X is the answer. It seems like death throes (of Rubinius) to me, rather than any substantial commentary on Ruby in general.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      A few points: 1. Dying != dead 2. In addition to being maintainer of Rubinius, Brian Shirai is the creator of RubySpec. To me, Rubinius X is more a forward-looking extension of RubySpec then it is something about building support for Rubinius-the-project. As RubySpec sought to create and concretize agreement on what Ruby is (which was important to making Ruby-the-language something more than MRI-the-implementation), Rubinius X is an (opinionated) effort to establish a consensus on where Ruby-the-language is going and how it is going to address the aspects of Ruby that are limiting its adoption. 3. I'm not at all surprised that the fact that Engine Yard, historically one of the biggest corporate players in the Ruby world and who until fairly recently was paying core developers for both JRuby and Rubinius is now not directly sponsoring either would be a source of soul searching and consideration of the future, both of the Rubinius and Ruby. I'd be rather more surprised if it wasn't.
deleted 13y ago
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desireco42 13y ago
This is such a flame bait :) Does Rubinius really needs this? I installed it last week and trying it out with Rails 4 to see how it feels. Ruby is alive and well. And mainstream.
davidroetzel 13y ago
I have so many thoughts about this post right now, that I find it hard to put them into a coherent comment. Still, I want them out there: 1) I, too, feel that Ruby is no longer as fashionable as it used to be. I do not think this to be much of a problem and more like the natural way fashions work. But I still think the effect can be observed. It was not long ago that I learned about a cool new project written in Ruby here on HN on a weekly basis. These days, it has become a rare occurence. 2) It is a fact that the "cool kids" have moved on. But there is not the one big new thing. Rather, people who were popular in the Ruby world 5 years ago use Scala, Clojure, Node.js, Go and a few other things these days. 3) Still, Rails seems to be very popular with startups. Maybe not with the ones that are highly technical. But many of those just trying to get a mvp out there seem to default to rails these days. 4) I love Ruby. I used to love learning new programming languages. But ever since writing Ruby code on a daily basis, other languages most often fail to attract me. And I no longer look at technical benefits. Instead I take a look at the syntax and most often I am annoyed. Ruby has this effect on _some_ people, but not on others. For those who do not care about Ruby's aesthetics, there is probably little to keep them from trying out other languages. 5) There is little in the list of features on x.rubini.us that I disagree with. But at the same time, there is nothing I ever missed. Also, I am not convinced that all of those issues can or should be solved on the interpreter level. 6) Instead of a list of features, I would love to see a list of the kinds of applications that would benefit from those. I am not convinced that Node.js-style network services should be the future of Ruby.
websitescenes 13y ago
This post is hilarious but all jokes aside I am still interested to see what "Rubinius X" turns out to be.
cryptolect 13y ago
The most common complaint I hear when I talk about Ruby is it's poor performance. The languages I hear mentioned most often (by the complainers) as alternatives include Go and Node.js. I've used Ruby for a few years as a part-time coder. In that time I've never ventured out to try the variety of Ruby interpreters available. For instance, I've heard of JRuby, and I have also heard it's really fast, but it just seems like it's intended for "enterprise" use-cases, rather than my day to day scenarios. If there are all these faster Ruby interpreter variants out there, one 'evangelism' approach could simply be to make them more visible and approachable to end-users. There's also opportunities for package maintainers to work to make these alternatives available in the various Linux/Unix distributions. I want to be able to apt-get them, rather than hunt down a PPA or build via RVM. Is there anything else beyond speed that is holding Ruby back from greater mindshare?
- rip747 13y ago
  IIS integration period the end. well that was argument awhile back. nowadays with products like Helicon Zoo (which i use for development), it make integrating a rails (or php, python, cfml) site with IIS a breeze. seriously, if you're using IIS and want to run a rails site, you should have looked at Helicon Zoo.
- thenonsequitur 13y ago
  First, let me start by saying I'm a day-to-day Ruby developer and I absolutely love the language. That said, there are things besides the speed that prevent the acceptance of Ruby among people: * No static type checking, potentially resulting in more bugs * Ease of monkey-patching, potentially resulting in insecurities * Rampant use of hash-as-arguments, resulting in method definitions that don't actually define their arguments (though Ruby 2.0 fixes this with named parameters, it's still a common pattern) * Heavy use of symbols, which some people see as the moral equivalent of magic strings I personally think all of these arguments are bunk except for the over-use of hash-as-arguments even in Ruby 2.0. But some people give them credence.
- deleted 13y ago
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- 13y ago
rip747 13y ago
so a week ago it was CFML and this week its Ruby. is there going to be any week that the languages i program in doesn't get bashed on the net ;)
ciferkey 13y ago
To be relevant today, a programming language must provide simple yet powerful facilities for composition and collaboration. A language does not need general immutable state, purely pure functions, or complex type systems, no matter how inferred. Is this a poke at Haskell?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Is this a poke at Haskell? Its saying that a language doesn't have to be Haskell to be relevant. If that's what you consider a "poke", then sure.
hugh4life 13y ago
While I find the project interesting, I see nothing about performance. I'd like to see a focus on performance using optional type annotations. http://www.mirah.org http://www.mirah.org
vlucas 13y ago
"Ruby is failing to help businesses engage customers. It is seen as inefficient and inferior to other languages." This is pure bullshit. If your business is advertising a particular programming language in order to "engage customers", you are doing something terribly wrong (unless you're in a niche developer market). Your customer doesn't even care about the programming language your site is written in at all. All they want is business value. If the value of your software outweighs the cost, THAT is how you engage customers. Ruby and other dynamic languages like Python and PHP will always have a place, no matter how they do or don't scale. The danger for 95% of startups is complete failure - not succeeding and not getting any traction at all, not "OMG how are we going to scale this with the hundreds of millions of pageviews we have?". A focus on rapid prototyping and productivity for a small team is exactly what most startups need, and Ruby/Rails is a great fit for that. It's not going anywhere, and it's certainly not going to die.
reillyse 13y ago
what a load of rubbish. I have seen absolutely no evidence that Ruby is dying or even ill. This article provides absolutely no evidence but just makes a completely unsubstantiated claim. Saying startups aren't bragging that they are using Ruby as proof that it is dead is pretty dumb. Sure Ruby isn't the hot new thing anymore, it's not as "cool" as it used to be and the people who always want to be trying the latest languages aren't experimenting with it and writing blogs about it. But it's very much alive and kicking, just much more mature and less sexy. Which is inevitable.
djhworld 13y ago
I'm not entirely sure what this is, is it a rewrite/syntax clean up of the existing ruby language that runs on the Rubinus VM?
rupert654 13y ago
I hate this phrase. It doesn't mean what people think it means and wouldn't make any sense if it did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

153 points by yannski 13y ago

Similarly, C and Java are dying since nobody touts their use of them in PR materials. Also Postgres and HTTP. /snark Technology hipsterism != technology vitality.

wil421 13y ago
But my start up isn't cool if we aren't using the newest and greatest buzzword technologies.
d0m 13y ago
It depends of the language I suppose. Ruby was all about being new, cool and fun. Call that hipsterism if you want. But now that people moved on, it's fair to ask ourselves "Who is going to use Ruby for their next project?". Big company? No. Hipsters? No. You? Maybe : )
- jmagoon 13y ago
  I work at a big company and we use ruby all the time. It's a powerful scripting language that we can rapidly develop in for the 1000s (literally) of small programs that need to work with our legacy unix systems.
- jmagoon 13y ago
  I work at a big company and we use ruby all the time. It's a powerful scripting language that we can rapidly develop in for the 1000s (literally) of small programs that need to work with our legacy unix systems.

dcu 13y ago

...until people realize the mess that is node.js. I would rather say Rails is dying because it no longer fits the new web programming paradigms.

girvo 13y ago
So very much this. I never really learnt Rails, to be honest. I dabbled, but never got fully into it. The thing is, the way I'm writing web apps now (nice API's over straight classes, composable libraries, and a routing layer over the top to give it a REST interface) doesn't fit my mental model of how Rails works. Similarly, I've somewhat abandoned "MVC" for web-apps. Nice API's with the ability to have any front-end, not kicking out HTML from my framework, and the like -- that's what I'm doing now. Don't get me wrong -- I know that Rails (especially 4) can do all this as well. Heck, there's not much stopping me from doing what I'm doing here with straight Ruby, a couple of libraries and Sinatra (I have a good friend who does exactly that). But for some reason, I've instead written off ruby entirely for that use-case. I'm merely the n=1 here though, and as a non-ruby programmer, my opinion doesn't mean much I guess. But I find it curious how I ended up skipping it.
- jalopy 13y ago
  Interesting, as that's very much how my mental model of how Rails works: 1. The routing layer is all about declaring a resource which gives you all 7 major REST operations, and 2. there's a nice facility for responding_to any data format (html, json, js, text, etc) you want. With rails scaffolding, you can pretty much get all boilerplate code written for you, and have it very simply implement a REST backend for a more "heavyweight" javascript framework (angular, ember, etc). I wonder if the issue is that rails didn't originally start out this way, and now people assume that Rails is stuck in the past? I think the article gets it right in that Ruby needs better concurrency primitives (promises are a nice idea), and esp better performance. If Javascript can be as fast as it is with V8, there should be nothing stopping Ruby from achieving similar levels of performance.
  - girvo 13y ago
    > I wonder if the issue is that rails didn't originally start out this way, and now people assume that Rails is stuck in the past? I don't think I got it across in my post correctly, but that's basically what I was trying to say, yeah! I even _know_ that I have that cognitive bias, and yet it remains. I even tried to pick up Rails 4 last week, and put it back down rather quickly again.

yannski 13y ago

The post contains lots of contradictory facts. First, some people (not all) are using other tools than Ruby. They are looking for a solution to their problems. IMHO Ruby is not even present in the discussion when people make their choices. But Rails is. So I'm not sure that modernizing Ruby is sufficient. Building a modern framework around it could be though. I mean, people go to NodeJS because of Node, not because of Javascript...

the_watcher 13y ago
>>But Rails is I was about to mention this. I know of at least two (very) hot S13 YC companies that either built their web app in Rails or explicitly deal with Rails (not sure if One Month Rails is built in Rails or not, but it is pretty explicitly pro-Rails). Does Rails prevalence preclude Ruby from being a dying language? Depends on what you mean by dying. The dominance of Rails is probably something of a blessing and a curse for the broader Ruby world. I'm too new to it to have a strong position, but I will say that as a novice developer, I went with Ruby and Rails because there is a fantastic suite of tools for learning from scratch.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  Rails is a curse. Because of it, Ruby (which is a fantastic language) has been reduced to a web language, when it's really much more than that.
  - jaredonline 13y ago
    Ruby was a little-known project before Rails came along. Without Rails, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
  - the_watcher 13y ago
    I never would have been exposed to Ruby if not for Rails (I'm a novice, self taught developer). While everyone talks about how amazing Scala and Haskell are (of which I have no doubt), I learned Ruby because Rails allowed me to build little projects (usually web apps) very easily. Now I have branched out into a bit of node.JS, some Python, and some Clojure (I like the idea of learning a Lisp), but Rails was a friendly entry point.

bencollier49 13y ago

"The few exceptions prove the rule". I don't think this means what he thinks it means.

neals 13y ago
Just a few of my cats are male. This proves that all my cats are female. Right?
randomknowledge 13y ago
The most charitable interpretation of the claim I could think of was that the author meant the few exceptions illustrate why the other companies are moving away from ruby.
bronson 13y ago
It's just another hand-waved argument in the whole confused post. If the dude's approach to code matches his approach to writing then we have nothing to worry about.
talkingquickly 13y ago
Agreed, I think the author has mis-understood what it means. Quite a common one to get wrong though, for anyone wondering it generally means that stating an exception proves/ establishes/ implies that a general rule exists. E.g. You may not play ball in the park within 20 metres of the road implies that the general rules is that you can play ball elsewhere in the park. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
thenonsequitur 13y ago
I think he's taking as axiomatic that there only a few people using ruby, thus claiming this demonstrates the general rule people don't use ruby. Thus he is, in fact, using the phrase correctly. But by taking it as axiomatic that few people use ruby, he is begging the question.

notwedtm 13y ago

Um, wut? This post is so confusing. I see some half thought out ideas, but no solutions. Ruby may not be Java or JavaScript, but why would you want it to be? You have Java and JavaScript for times when you want to use Java or JavaScript. Use the right tool for the job.

davidw 13y ago

No, Ruby died last month, but now it's cool again in a retro sort of way. Node.js is what's dying this week. Next month, Tcl is going to make a comeback.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
Oh God, I certainly hope so.
- girvo 13y ago
  Everything is a string! Seriously, I don't mind Tcl at all. Does that make me crazy?
  - smrtinsert 13y ago
    No tcl is nice. It's expressive and functional. I love not having to use the shift key every two characters for expressions. upvar/uplevel are awesome for creating new language contructs and meta programming. People ditched it because it wasn't cool, but it got the job done and remains useful and succinct.
    - loup-vaillant 13y ago
      > I love not having to use the shift key every two characters for expressions. Just customize your keyboard layout, and reverse shift behaviour for the number row. There, better symbol access.
  - davidw 13y ago
    Actually, internally, everything is not a string, and has not been that way since... 10+ years. Everything is representable as a string, though. I actually like Tcl quite a bit even if I don't use it much these days: http://www.amazon.com/Tcl-Toolkit-2nd-John-Ousterhout/dp/032133633X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381852799&sr=1-1&keywords=tcl+and+the+tk+toolkit&tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/Tcl-Toolkit-2nd-John-Ousterhout/dp/032... (See the cover for all of the authors' names :-)

Mikeb85 13y ago

Rails is dying. Ruby isn't. It just isn't as popular amongst hipster web programmers anymore... There's some very interesting things going on in the non-Rails and non-web framework Ruby world...

the_watcher 13y ago
What is the evidence that Rails is dying? The programming bootcamp movement is primarily Rails-based, One Month Rails just came out of YC, and I know of at least one other S13 YC company who built their web app in Rails. What seems to have changed is that not every startup is being built with Rails anymore, which I'd say is a positive thing that does not mean Rails is dying.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  The hype is dying. I also think the web is moving beyond the Rails model...
  - randomdata 13y ago
    The hype is definitely dying, as it should. Rails is just months shy of being 10 years old. I find it kind of amazing that using Rails was even newsworthy within the past couple of years, given how long it has been in use. A startup choosing Rails to power their application today is like a startup choosing Linux to power their servers. It is not something worth reporting. It doesn't necessarily mean the usage is in decline though.
  - the_watcher 13y ago
    That's a good thing, right? Rails is a great tool for the projects that it should be used for. It should be picked on merits, not on hype.
peteratt 13y ago
Totally agree with your point. Though it might seem that Rails has scaling problems and is regarded as slow and painful once the system matures, there are many many other applications to the language in itself. Plus, there's a lot to be done on the performance side of things. Ruby compilers have come a long way, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. Just look at Puppet. It is so awesome, and it's implemented in Ruby. Ruby is definitely growing like a weed among the devops community.

rhapsodyv 13y ago

The post doesn't point to any data proving the point. I'm curios from where he had concluded that ruby is dying...

yannski 13y ago
From his media trainer, certainly...
- kookster 13y ago
  +1 this: sensational headline = controversy = hackernews frontpage
eric970 13y ago
You don't need data to back up bold claims when your ego is the size of a watermelon.

beat 13y ago

Businesses (meaning Big Business, I suppose) don't reject Ruby because it's "a dying language". They reject it because they're inherently conservative. Java and .Net rule the roost because they're seen as safe, respectable choices. The appearance of risk is more important to most businesses than actual risk. Ruby isn't dominant, therefore it is perceived as risky. Java's complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project, but it's not "risky" because it's dominant.

smacktoward 13y ago
Java and .NET are also backed by ginormous corporations (Oracle and Microsoft), which big business also generally views as a major risk-mitigating factor. (It isn't really -- in fact it's the opposite, "corporate" platforms tend to die out faster than open-source ones, at least in my experience -- but they think it is, which in this discussion is all that matters.)
- klaustopher 13y ago
  Also, let's not forget about IBM, HP, RedHat and all the other shops that back Java
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    to be just here: RedHat also backs jruby.
    - Argorak 13y ago
      Heck, RedHat even has a big JRuby Application Server on top of JBoss. http://torquebox.org/ http://torquebox.org/
- xs_kid 13y ago
  Oracle has some JRuby apps on production
- pnathan 13y ago

gesman 13y ago

Lets face it - Ruby is a great language and wrapped with Rails it allows to craft napkin idea to working, real-world prototype in record short amount of time. These capabilities prove to be golden for Silicon Valley startups where speed of execution means difference between life and death (VC or nothing). Once done - startups are praying for a quick exit until the issues of gems mess, scaling, performance and deployment nightmares start raising their ugly heads and requires ample continuous investments in administration and management talents to keep things afloat. Serious multi-billion enterprises need performance, guarantees of commercial support from big vendor, speed of compiled languages and cannot afford to use interpreted languages and have their feet stuck in all that swamp. Hence they use Java and dot NET. That's a fact of life.

lectrick 13y ago
Given that you will have to figure out scaling issues eventually anyway, the speed of compiled languages should NOT be weighed heavier than programming ease in your decisionmaking. Programmer time is FAR more expensive than hardware these days.
- free652 13y ago
  Actually it matters a lot. Since when the programmers manage servers? More servers = more people managing them. And if for a compiled language you need 2 data centers for Ruby you need 20... And level 4 data centers are expensive. Ruby is great at what it does. I don't see Node.js replacing it anytime soon. But Ruby won't be in enterprise anytime soon also.
- gesman 13y ago
  Throwing money in hardware to compensate for chosen framework's sluggishness doesn't seems to run well with people who sign the checks.
  - outside1234 13y ago
    Neither does buying extra programmers.

kookster 13y ago

Many Rails folks have moved on to other things, many of them to Node.js, and in general development is becoming less homogenous (i.e. Go services interacting with a Rails app/middleware, and an Angular.js front-end). This is a good thing; we are seeing people more willing to use the right tool for the job rather than trying to use one language for everything.

jwarzech 13y ago
This. I think of any of the comments so far you express what I'm seeing as well (I know 'use case of 1'). Distributed & modularized apps where each component uses the language/framework best suited for the job.

eric970 13y ago

[rant] If you're going to claim that your strong opinions are facts, please treat them as such and give citations or back them up yourself. [/rant] Ruby is not my favorite language anymore, but I still use it and see evidence that there is a huge place it fills in the dev community and ecosystem. I have never used a more expressive language. I'm stating this as a fact from what I have experienced, and I'm giving points that back it up. There are dozens of actively maintained Ruby projects, some of which are the most popular repos on GitHub. I don't see any evidence that the Ruby ecosystem is on a downward trend of activity and is "dying", so I have no reason to think otherwise. This kind of stuff reminds me why I take breaks from HackerNews every once in a while -_- Yuck.

lectrick 13y ago

If you love a tool, it won't die. Period. And lots of people (myself included) still love Ruby. And I finally released a potentially useful gem for medium to large Ruby/Rails codebases. Are unmitigated monkeypatches complexifying your codebase to the point of pain? I wrote a gem to help manage that... https://github.com/pmarreck/pachinko https://github.com/pmarreck/pachinko

starrhorne 13y ago

There are 20-30 ruby conferences every year in the US alone. I've been to about 7. They all had > 200 attendees. Even the less-known ones tend to sell out well in advance. Freelance rates for ruby developers are crazy-high. In Seattle, at least, I'm seeing $200/hr as not uncommon. And on a side note, PHP has been around for about 80 years now and it's still moving along. So I don't think ruby/rails are going to "die" any time soon.

jaredonline 13y ago
Thank you for being the first comment (I've seen) that actually looks at some amount of data. It's hard to read "most Rails people are moving on", "Rails and Ruby don't find the new web model" and "node.js is replacing Ruby" over and over without anyone saying how they're coming to their conclusions. My thoughts are the same as yours... Ruby and/or Rails aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Just think, Rails powers the site that stores most startups code. It may not be as shiny and new as it was, but there's still a lot of usage.
bybjorn 13y ago
More like 20 years, but yeah, I guess 20 Internet Years equals around 80 standard years..
- thenonsequitur 13y ago
  Interestingly, Ruby is also approaching its 20-year anniversary. Of course, PHP has been popular much longer than Ruby.
reuven 13y ago
Yes, exactly. If Ruby is dying, then why are Ruby conferences popping up everywhere? Why are Ruby developers in desperately short supply? I live in Israel, where Ruby has taken a while to make inroads. But we just had a conference last week, and the many attendees were super excited about the language. And companies were desperate to find employees who know Ruby and/or Rails. Indeed, the biggest reason that I've found companies give for avoiding the use of Ruby is the scarcity of experienced developers. A client of mine switched from Ruby to PHP last year, simply because he could easily find PHP programmers, and they cost a lot less. You could argue that this points to companies leaving Ruby, but in many ways, I'd say that it rather indicates Ruby is a victim of its own success. Even if Ruby is dying (which I don't think is the case), plenty of seemingly dead languages are still in demand, and are used on all sorts of projects. You can command great consulting rates in COBOL, today, if you want. Both Ruby and Rails have strong, active communities that are pushing the language and framework forward in all sorts of interesting ways. The key to a successful open-source project is the community, so I'm pretty confident that I'll be working in Ruby for at least a few more years. But hey, if the author wants to work in something else, power to him; we're fortunate to be living in an era of many high-quality, open-source languages.

adamkittelson 13y ago

This post really needed to follow up on the whole "Ruby is dying" part with some sort of "and here's how Rubinius X can help" part. The way it's written has caused everyone here to debate whether or not Ruby is dying and completely ignore the announcement. I'm sure the title of the HN link isn't helping either.

regularfry 13y ago
That would be in the first link.

otikik 13y ago

http://x.rubini.us/ http://x.rubini.us/ I like everything I read there except undefined. I have been using Lua for a while now and having only two falsy values is great. I am not convinced adding a third is a good trade-off.

static_typed 13y ago

Ruby is not dead, it just smells that way. Seriously though, it's demise is a little overstated - the BBC for one use it quite a bit, as do quite a few startups. The author of the post seems a bit butthurt that Ruby has not surplanted all other technologies - and it never will. One big problem is that for most businesses their first and perhaps last taste of Ruby comes from Rails, and it's security fails. That is a shame. Having been burnt by the failed promises of Rails ourselves, our company moved onto Python, and never looked back. Also, Ruby is just one tool in the kit, fine for some jobs, patently unsuitable for many others. The evangelists should realise this, and not do a disservice to Ruby by trying to shove it into every place and frankly pissing off potential future adopters of that technology.

thinkpad20 13y ago

A baseless, attention-grabbing headline, a vague language spec that doesn't really seem to be adding any new ideas (and indeed rejecting some good ones), and no actual working code. Get back to me when you actually write something; until then all this is is a glorified blog post with a "wouldn't it be nice if there were ____ language out there?"

dasil003 13y ago

The hyperbole is undermining the point.

27182818284 13y ago

It has definitely lost the cool edge that it had. In the midwestern US, it takes longer for trends to penetrate and I saw the Ruby height in popularity here after it had been eating Hacker News alive for a while. Now out here, it is definitely Node.js. All the new young developers talk about it. The old PHP devs in town talk about it, but can't switch to it because all of their libraries and business is in PHP, etc. Interestingly enough, event-loop non-blocking, etc is NEVER the reason mentioned by the devs interested in it and using it. They only mention how nice it is to have basically the same language in the frontend and backend. They claim not having your brain switch like that is a huge benefit (which I could believe, but I haven't tried. (Python+Django+Flask dev myself))

SmileyKeith 13y ago

Ruby just seems to be actually getting used by large projects. I personally think that makes sense because you want to see that a language can stand some sort of test of time before entirely adopting it. I think what Jeff Atwood had to say about it [1] when choosing to use it for Discourse [2] shows a different opinion that this article. One that I agree with more. [1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html [2]: http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/

smacktoward 13y ago
Atwood's argument boils down to "I wanted to work with this one guy, and what he uses is Ruby." Which is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't really say much about the popularity of the language among programmers in general.

cromwellian 13y ago

I'm going to lose a lot of karma of this one, but here we go. The organizations I know of that have switched from Ruby to Java have done so for the following reasons: 1) Performance. The JVM simply scales better, it is more cost effective in the datacenter. Without mentioning names, I know of significant Silicon Valley darlings that spent huge sums trying to scale Ruby, got crushed, and eventually ripped-and-replaced the backends with Java. 2) Skill Availability. There are 7+ million Java programmers, it is easier to hire Java programmers. 3) Tool Availability and Maturity. I think Ruby is a fine language, but I see it like PHP, great for rapid prototyping and productivity in the small, but it's version 1 for the lean startup or for the corporate departmental app. Version 2 is Java, C#, etc using the UX and product feature lessons learned from the Ruby prototype. IMHO, Node.js is the new Ruby. It has the benefit of having the same language on the client and the server, but once again, it's going to run into similar scalability issues when large organizations try to use it. I think we're going to run into the same issues, of it becoming a cool bandwagon, the platform being stretched to its breaking point, followed by the realization that there are serious problems.

tonyedgecombe 13y ago
I think a bigger change is the JVM and .Net don't suck so much now. There are interesting languages like Scala and Groovy on the JVM and frameworks like Play and MVC on .Net that make development less painful.
- danieldk 13y ago
  I think a bigger change is the JVM and .Net don't suck so much now. Frankly, JVM hasn't really sucked since it got a JIT compiler (J2SE 1.2, 1998) or if you prefer the switch to HotSpot as the default VM (J2SE 1.3, 2000).
blueblob 13y ago
I guess JRuby is trying to address the first point and they wouldn't have to retrain their staff. I don't know how popular JRuby is but it runs on the JVM.
13y ago

bradleyland 13y ago

I'm kind of disappointed in the way the author is approaching the launch of Rubinius X. The "death of Ruby" is being used as a rhetorical device. The strategy appears to be that if we all believe that Ruby is actually dying, we're more likely to get behind Rubinius X. Unfortunately, no support is provided for this claim. Rubinius has always been the Ruby that placed purity before pragmatism. I applaud them for that, but putting forth the assertion that Ruby is dying as a means to drum up support for a new generation of Ruby seems like getting off on the wrong foot.

dragonwriter 13y ago
Ruby does seem to be, if not dying, at least losing a lot of the buzz it had a few years back, but mostly that seems to be because Rails has lost the buzz it had, and much of Ruby's buzz was actually not Ruby buzz, but Rails buzz. That being said, I think the vision Rubinius X has about where Ruby should go is great -- both in terms of language features and conventions -- and I think that besides the specific details, the high-level strategic vision is something Ruby needs.
- habitue 13y ago
  It is suspicious though that the Rubinius project just lost funding from Engine Yard, and now (like a week later?) the maintainer has declared Ruby dead and Rubinius X is the answer. It seems like death throes (of Rubinius) to me, rather than any substantial commentary on Ruby in general.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    A few points: 1. Dying != dead 2. In addition to being maintainer of Rubinius, Brian Shirai is the creator of RubySpec. To me, Rubinius X is more a forward-looking extension of RubySpec then it is something about building support for Rubinius-the-project. As RubySpec sought to create and concretize agreement on what Ruby is (which was important to making Ruby-the-language something more than MRI-the-implementation), Rubinius X is an (opinionated) effort to establish a consensus on where Ruby-the-language is going and how it is going to address the aspects of Ruby that are limiting its adoption. 3. I'm not at all surprised that the fact that Engine Yard, historically one of the biggest corporate players in the Ruby world and who until fairly recently was paying core developers for both JRuby and Rubinius is now not directly sponsoring either would be a source of soul searching and consideration of the future, both of the Rubinius and Ruby. I'd be rather more surprised if it wasn't.

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desireco42 13y ago

This is such a flame bait :) Does Rubinius really needs this? I installed it last week and trying it out with Rails 4 to see how it feels. Ruby is alive and well. And mainstream.

davidroetzel 13y ago

I have so many thoughts about this post right now, that I find it hard to put them into a coherent comment. Still, I want them out there: 1) I, too, feel that Ruby is no longer as fashionable as it used to be. I do not think this to be much of a problem and more like the natural way fashions work. But I still think the effect can be observed. It was not long ago that I learned about a cool new project written in Ruby here on HN on a weekly basis. These days, it has become a rare occurence. 2) It is a fact that the "cool kids" have moved on. But there is not the one big new thing. Rather, people who were popular in the Ruby world 5 years ago use Scala, Clojure, Node.js, Go and a few other things these days. 3) Still, Rails seems to be very popular with startups. Maybe not with the ones that are highly technical. But many of those just trying to get a mvp out there seem to default to rails these days. 4) I love Ruby. I used to love learning new programming languages. But ever since writing Ruby code on a daily basis, other languages most often fail to attract me. And I no longer look at technical benefits. Instead I take a look at the syntax and most often I am annoyed. Ruby has this effect on _some_ people, but not on others. For those who do not care about Ruby's aesthetics, there is probably little to keep them from trying out other languages. 5) There is little in the list of features on x.rubini.us that I disagree with. But at the same time, there is nothing I ever missed. Also, I am not convinced that all of those issues can or should be solved on the interpreter level. 6) Instead of a list of features, I would love to see a list of the kinds of applications that would benefit from those. I am not convinced that Node.js-style network services should be the future of Ruby.

websitescenes 13y ago

This post is hilarious but all jokes aside I am still interested to see what "Rubinius X" turns out to be.

cryptolect 13y ago

The most common complaint I hear when I talk about Ruby is it's poor performance. The languages I hear mentioned most often (by the complainers) as alternatives include Go and Node.js. I've used Ruby for a few years as a part-time coder. In that time I've never ventured out to try the variety of Ruby interpreters available. For instance, I've heard of JRuby, and I have also heard it's really fast, but it just seems like it's intended for "enterprise" use-cases, rather than my day to day scenarios. If there are all these faster Ruby interpreter variants out there, one 'evangelism' approach could simply be to make them more visible and approachable to end-users. There's also opportunities for package maintainers to work to make these alternatives available in the various Linux/Unix distributions. I want to be able to apt-get them, rather than hunt down a PPA or build via RVM. Is there anything else beyond speed that is holding Ruby back from greater mindshare?

rip747 13y ago
IIS integration period the end. well that was argument awhile back. nowadays with products like Helicon Zoo (which i use for development), it make integrating a rails (or php, python, cfml) site with IIS a breeze. seriously, if you're using IIS and want to run a rails site, you should have looked at Helicon Zoo.
thenonsequitur 13y ago
First, let me start by saying I'm a day-to-day Ruby developer and I absolutely love the language. That said, there are things besides the speed that prevent the acceptance of Ruby among people: * No static type checking, potentially resulting in more bugs * Ease of monkey-patching, potentially resulting in insecurities * Rampant use of hash-as-arguments, resulting in method definitions that don't actually define their arguments (though Ruby 2.0 fixes this with named parameters, it's still a common pattern) * Heavy use of symbols, which some people see as the moral equivalent of magic strings I personally think all of these arguments are bunk except for the over-use of hash-as-arguments even in Ruby 2.0. But some people give them credence.
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rip747 13y ago

so a week ago it was CFML and this week its Ruby. is there going to be any week that the languages i program in doesn't get bashed on the net ;)

ciferkey 13y ago

To be relevant today, a programming language must provide simple yet powerful facilities for composition and collaboration. A language does not need general immutable state, purely pure functions, or complex type systems, no matter how inferred. Is this a poke at Haskell?

dragonwriter 13y ago
> Is this a poke at Haskell? Its saying that a language doesn't have to be Haskell to be relevant. If that's what you consider a "poke", then sure.

hugh4life 13y ago

While I find the project interesting, I see nothing about performance. I'd like to see a focus on performance using optional type annotations. http://www.mirah.org http://www.mirah.org

vlucas 13y ago

"Ruby is failing to help businesses engage customers. It is seen as inefficient and inferior to other languages." This is pure bullshit. If your business is advertising a particular programming language in order to "engage customers", you are doing something terribly wrong (unless you're in a niche developer market). Your customer doesn't even care about the programming language your site is written in at all. All they want is business value. If the value of your software outweighs the cost, THAT is how you engage customers. Ruby and other dynamic languages like Python and PHP will always have a place, no matter how they do or don't scale. The danger for 95% of startups is complete failure - not succeeding and not getting any traction at all, not "OMG how are we going to scale this with the hundreds of millions of pageviews we have?". A focus on rapid prototyping and productivity for a small team is exactly what most startups need, and Ruby/Rails is a great fit for that. It's not going anywhere, and it's certainly not going to die.

reillyse 13y ago

what a load of rubbish. I have seen absolutely no evidence that Ruby is dying or even ill. This article provides absolutely no evidence but just makes a completely unsubstantiated claim. Saying startups aren't bragging that they are using Ruby as proof that it is dead is pretty dumb. Sure Ruby isn't the hot new thing anymore, it's not as "cool" as it used to be and the people who always want to be trying the latest languages aren't experimenting with it and writing blogs about it. But it's very much alive and kicking, just much more mature and less sexy. Which is inevitable.

djhworld 13y ago

I'm not entirely sure what this is, is it a rewrite/syntax clean up of the existing ruby language that runs on the Rubinus VM?

rupert654 13y ago

I hate this phrase. It doesn't mean what people think it means and wouldn't make any sense if it did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule