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Absolutely. I sat out the Ruby/Rails hype cycle and am none the worse for it. Life is too short to waste time learning ephemeral tech like Ruby, Node.js, or Mon
by cprogrammer1101 11y ago
Absolutely. I sat out the Ruby/Rails hype cycle and am none the worse for it. Life is too short to waste time learning ephemeral tech like Ruby, Node.js, or MongoDB. When considering whether to learn a new language or platform, I ask myself, how long have people been using this, and how long will people likely continue to use it? As a result, I know C, Common Lisp/Elisp, UNIX/POSIX, and a relational database or two very, very well. I suspect I'd be much less happy if I had instead spent time learning how to build single-threaded JavaScript web apps that rely, in 2015, on cooperative multitasking, let alone doing so with other hipster programmers who actually think it's a good idea.
- nwmcsween 11y agoEh I disagree learning new languages can make you think in different ways. I know Ruby, Shell, C, Javascript and some OCaml and Haskell, each have taught me something that I apply to others.
- cprogrammer1101 11y agoRuby doesn't teach you anything if you already know Lisp + CLOS or Smalltalk.
- freyr 11y agoI never bothered learning a newfangled, flavor-of-the-week language like C. As a result, I'm an expert in COBOL and Fortran. I suspect I'm much happier not knowing C.
- cprogrammer1101 11y agoYou know, you're right; there's no such thing as an ephemeral language or platform. Why, look at all new projects started every day in QBasic, Tcl, or Turbo Pascal. I'm sure people will be building stuff with Ruby forty years from now.
- weeksie 11y agoThe Ruby/Rails hype cycle started like ten years ago. Rails is one of the most widely used web app frameworks in the market. Ruby's been around for twenty-odd years and has gone from being a niche scripting language to one that's used to power an outrageous amount of big applications. It's not a pissing contest by any means, but calling Ruby and Rails a hype cycle is just inaccurate.