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I was a full-time Rubyist for a long time

I was a full-time Rubyist for a long time. I started the UK's first dedicated Ruby on Rails consultancy in 2006 before Rails was even v1.0 (IIRC the first apps I shipped back then were 0.8.6). I stuck around through the hype chain, and then started to help one employer break up a RoR monolith into micro services and adopt Java and Go (this was a mistake - we should have crafted the monolith better). I've built 4 startups as hands-on CTO with Ruby and Rails. It fed and housed me for many years. In the last 5-7 years I've had to go in other directions. Clojure, Python, Java, even back to C and taking a look at Rust and Zig. I'm now in a role where I don't code so much, but I can see Ruby's problems - performance, the surprises, the fact it allows idiots to do idiotic things (nobody under the age of 40 should be legally allowed to monkey patch a base class or engage in meta programming). And yet when I want to do something for me, for fun, perhaps advent of code, or a quick mock-up of something that's rolling around in my head, I reach for Ruby. …

Original discussionDo I not like Ruby anymore? (2024)178 source comments · at import
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JE

I've been on a similar journey. I was deep into rails early in my career. Then I moved on, especially liking typescript. I thought I wouldn't go back. But you don't always get the choice, a great job came up and it was a rails app. I found joy in it again - and I'm still there nearly 10 years on. Ruby feels like how OOP should be, it's so very easy to implement patterns that other languages make verbose and horrible. I'm guilty of a lot of metaprogramming, hope you forgive me, I am over 40. I think it can be an undervalued super power of the language: something isn't working or you need deeper insight, just break into the innards of any library you're using and insert logging and/or your own code. Anyway, that said, for new personal projects I like typescript and rust. But recently I needed to stick an admin interface on such a project and rails shines there, you can get something good a…

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JA

Ruby feels like a luxury manual hand saw. It fits in the hand perfectly. But it would not be my first choice for every project. Languages like C#, Java, C++, Scala, Kotlin, and Python in 2025 feel like industrial computerized bandsaws with twenty different settings and controls. Some more complicated than others. They can be tuned to crank out a factories needs but you could spend days just fussing with a single setting that isn't right. That being said, modern Python to me feels like the least thought out of these. It has been incrementally changed from one language to another, while being forced to keep many of the worst parts of both. To be honest, I think they should keep up the "breaking backwards compatibility" trend and make Python 4 an optionally-compiled, statically-typed language more like Go, but with more expressivity than Go. I suppose F# is already like my ideal Python 4. I…

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