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Discussion on: Pitch me on Ruby

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aclarembeau profile image
aclarembeau

I've been using ruby quite extensively over the past 3 years, and I would describe it as the following:

Ruby is a modern programming language with a clean syntax.

Nothing more, nothing less. It's quite similar as Python, but with a few more syntaxic sugar (it allows you to write your code in many alternative ways, that I often find very pleasant to read, compared to other languages, which are generally more "rigid").

The places where it shines is when you has to write web applications, thanks to the beautiful Ruby on Rails framework, that allows, thanks to a well defined architecture, and good balance between presets and flexibility to quickly build new applications (and it comes with a very good ecosystem of libraries, called "gems")

So, to summarize:

  • It's pretty neat to read
  • It is really good to quickly build application with the Rails framework

Of course, it has drawbacks too, like:

  • Not so good support for concurrency (afaik, it doesn't have light threads with promise await like in Javascript for instance)
  • Relatively recent support for types (in case you need typing, Ruby is not always the right choice)