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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

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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dasil003 13y ago
You mentioned performance and packaging. There's also concurrency issues but those are improving. The most interesting critique of Ruby I've heard recently was from Tom Stuart @ Ruby Manor this year: http://lanyrd.com/2013/ruby-manor/scffpd/ http://lanyrd.com/2013/ruby-manor/scffpd/ In this talk he demonstrated how the multi-paradigm nature of Ruby makes it hard to fully realize the benefits of a single paradigm like FP or OOP. This is obviously not something that CTOs are bringing up in tech provisioning discussions, but I think it does prevent ruby from having the kind of strengths that would make it a go-to language for certain types of projects the way that Go, Scala, Node.js or Haskell are able to do these days. I think Ruby's biggest appeal is to programmers who care a great deal about aesthetics and expressiveness of code.

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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dasil003 13y ago

You mentioned performance and packaging. There's also concurrency issues but those are improving. The most interesting critique of Ruby I've heard recently was from Tom Stuart @ Ruby Manor this year: http://lanyrd.com/2013/ruby-manor/scffpd/ http://lanyrd.com/2013/ruby-manor/scffpd/ In this talk he demonstrated how the multi-paradigm nature of Ruby makes it hard to fully realize the benefits of a single paradigm like FP or OOP. This is obviously not something that CTOs are bringing up in tech provisioning discussions, but I think it does prevent ruby from having the kind of strengths that would make it a go-to language for certain types of projects the way that Go, Scala, Node.js or Haskell are able to do these days. I think Ruby's biggest appeal is to programmers who care a great deal about aesthetics and expressiveness of code.