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What’s your opinion on the Ruby programming language?
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Latest comments (41)
I have been working professionally with Ruby more than 6 years now. I love how easy it is for me to throw something together that works be it a web service/API with Sinatra or Grape, a command line script or anything with Rails. I love how easy it is to use and handle gems and ruby versions between projects (rvm/rbenv/chruby and bundler help with that). The best practices are mostly agreed upon within the community, we have Rubocop to make sure we are following these. There's lots of materials to study from, lots of open source and friendly people to help.
If you are looking for something to quickly setup a web backend and deploy (to Heroku) with just a git push, Ruby is great.
If you think that it can't perform, check Shopify's Black Friday stats.
A lot of people talking about types, there's a project called Sorbet (developed by Stripe) that brings a form of type checking to Ruby.
Ruby has mature testing tools (RSpec, capybara etc) and is one of the communities that really believes in good testing practices.
Would be happy to chat to anyone wanting to get more into Ruby and having difficulty with something.
My opinion is that it Ruby, along with Python, greatly improved the programming ecosystem for the better.
By putting an almost dogmatic focus on programmer's time over cpu time, the language allowed for elegant and beautiful features.
I came across Ruby around 2010 (circa Ruby 1.9) in my last year of college. Until then I'd written mostly in C, C++, Matlab and a small bit in Java and Scheme. I recall reading The Ruby Programming Language from front-to-back and just being in awe of the language. It's safe to say it's the first programming language I ever liked-liked. "Love" is a bit too strong...but it's close.
I started working through Project Euler problems using Ruby and was astounded by how Ruby handled FixNum to BigNum seamlessly.
Then I hit the performance wall. I can't blame Ruby, since I was a fledgling programmer and was probably throwing O(n^4) programs at irb. But you can say that I had my first "heartbreak" with the language.
At the time Rails was also really taking off. To the point where it was very obviously a fad/bubble but you couldn't help get swept up in it.
Then I think the Twitter rewrite from Ruby to Scala really took a "gem" out of Ruby's crown. Even though 99.9999% of companies are not going to have the scaling concerns that freaking Twitter is going to, everyone likes to imagine their startup will be the next Twitter and thinks that choosing Ruby will stop them from getting there, even though it's likely that Ruby's expressiveness is what got Twitter to where it would need a rewrite!
So yes, the "ruBY Is SLoW" argument won't go away anytime soon, but for me personally, Ruby was a level-up in my understanding of programming languages. I still find my thinking to be somewhat rooted in Ruby. Like when I had to learn Objective-C, I thought of Categories as akin to Modules. As I learned and am re-learning Lisp, I see Lisp's influence on Ruby and can better understand one because of the other.
I'm glad Ruby exists if nothing else to be a force pulling other programming languages to focus on programmer expressiveness.
P.S. Like others have mentioned, I'm also keeping a close eye on Crystal as it seems to be the optimal balance between expressiveness and ease of Ruby but with C-like blazing speed. It's more type-strict than Ruby and doesn't have the full "range" of Ruby, but it's super fast and super easy to pick up.
I thank the dark powers every day for Ruby, which was designed by its creator - Matz - with the express goal of making programmers happy. The ethos of happiness runs deep in the language. In fact, we have a saying/acronym: MINASWAN. Matz is nice and so we are nice. That has been demonstrated over and over during the 16 years since I started working with it.
The weird thing about our niceness is that it seems to make some developers who love other languages deeply uncomfortable, as though our niceness makes them somehow less nice by depleting some finite supply of niceness. If you're ever reading comments from someone who seems to wish Ruby would just roll over and die because it's inferior to what they like, chances are they just aren't prioritizing being nice.
The other thing that I find really compelling about working in Ruby is that it tends to draw some of the most interesting, creative, eccentric and artistic folks. Most of the best Ruby developers are deeply skilled in other, more traditionally "right-brained" disciplines, whether it's music, linguistics, art. Some of the wackiest characters I've met in my development life have been Ruby luminaries.
Right now, Ruby puts food on the table. I loved learning it in college and when I got the opportunity to write it professionally, I was ecstatic.
It does feel like writing English sometimes, but the downside is that a lot of that "English" is based on what you and your team have named things. So I think Ruby can turn a good design into a beautiful code base, but it'll make a bad or even mediocre design turn into an unmaintainable mess
If you ask me, Ruby is a perfect mix of Perl, Python and Smalltalk. Although I prefer C-like languages, I enjoy writing Ruby code whenever I need to work on company projects written in Rails. It's sad to see it's not popular as it was before, however, it's mature and has vast ecosystem ready to support almost anything you can imagine on the web.
Easy to grasp syntax but hard to implement or build something. A lot of dependency gems... Rails is hard... But I like Ruby...
I would love to pick it up, maybe just because of how DHH speaks of it :D
I recently tried it and one thing that put me off was the installation. I couldn't access installed gems like rails and searching online for the issue it seems there is a wide range of bundlers people use and I just couldn't find help for my super basic setup. I will probably try reinstalling everything again once I have a little more free time.
I suggest using rvm not to depend on the operating system's ruby :-)
I would suggest using chruby. It was reviewed and approved by the head rvm maintainer. The only reason to use RVM these days is if you are maintaining a legacy app that needs it.
Didn't know about chruby! Going to check it out :) Thanks!
Needing to use rvm was honestly a big reason that I let my ruby use dwindle to just chef customizations; I really couldn't stand having to maintain more than 2 package catalogs.
I like and use it, but wish its initial burst of broad popularity had held on through the rise/expansion in tooling and libraries other language ecosystems had. Compared head-to-head with just the compiler or interpreter for other languages, it has a lot of conveniences. But comparing its ecosystem with a JavaScript that can add static type-checking, a pretty-printer, and treat style issues as if they were fatal errors, Ruby is harder to use for large-scale engineering than it could be. Python, JavaScript, and C# seem to have much more investment in their libraries and their flagship web application frameworks have mostly caught up to Ruby, as well.
But on "the other other hand," Ruby has also invested a lot more effort into making sure their community is sustainable, putting it far ahead of other languages in that respect.
I love the Ruby, and with the Rails. I can spin up a simple Web App with API in minutes. I have never struggled in Ruby, Its like you dont need to be a fancy dev to write great ruby code. Its just happen to be Simple, Neat and Clean code that anyone can read. #loveit #ror #7yearsOfRailsExp #ror4lyf
Started using it in my new job. I do wish it had types for better autocompletion and self-documentation.
Other than that I do like it so far for being elegant and human-readable.
This. I love ruby but after a year of using Typescript + C# only I can say I definitely don’t miss having to fuck around to get proper completion.