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peoplefromibizaHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

@work I've tried to introduce Ruby to my colleagues that are very bad at programming, but good at …

… @work I've tried to introduce Ruby to my colleagues that are very bad at programming, but good at science. They ditched it with reasons like "I don't like it" or "it's too slow" without even measuring (it is not! Shopify would have died by now). I'm still using it without them knowing and it's the reason why I'm 10x faster than everybody else to build solutions. The other language it's the only one they "learned" at uni and keep using it for everything, even when it's the worst possible choice, management doesn't care and doesn't know the difference. software engineering is still not engineering, unfortunately.

Original discussionRuby 3.2.0 Is from Another Dimension330 source comments · at import
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michaelteterHN

Ruby is my favorite language, and often it is a joy to use because of its combined attributes of brevity, expressive power, and feature consistency. It's disappointing that there are so many more jobs for another popular language - one that lacks the elegance and consistency but which has a larger ecosystem. As far as I know, the only well known reason for a company to choose Ruby is if they want Rails (and obviously if the founding team already knows/likes Ruby). But that other language also has a popular (and comparatively clumsy) web framework plus well known modules for all the fantasy capabilities that startups dream of... you know, the AI/ML "not sure how we will use it but we know it will be great, and it's good for marketing". Sadly, I don't expect this situation to reverse in the future. Maybe like blockchain, once the AI/ML fantasy hype dies down the other comparatively-unpleas…

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pelasacoHN

the "too slow argument" is normally based on old internet opinions and benchmarks.. ruby today is pretty fast. In the company that I work, we do a lot of system programming using ruby, web development, etc.. It came to substitute perl around 2005, and we still using it successfully today. When we need something really, really fast, specially including parallel processing and etc, we just use jruby.

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jrockwayHN

How is "I don't like it" not a good reason for not using something? Ruby in science is the path of most resistance; if your work isn't already hard enough, here's a way to make it harder. That's because everyone is using Python. Think of it like writing scientific papers in English even though you like Esperanto better. Everyone uses English, so you have to too. That's Python's current state.

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adammarplesHN

In what situation is python the worst possible choice, while ruby which is very similar to it is the best possible choice? Unless you're doing some clever ruby metaprogramming type stuff which is totally impossible in python.

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ShorelHN

I think Dlang is better than the other languages mentioned in this thread, but I know almost no one uses it. It is what it is.

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