Ruby survives on affection, not utility. Let’s move on.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20251204034843/https://www.wired.com/story/ruby-is-not-a-serious-programming-language/
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it’s hilariously depressing how most people hate on Ruby because of the shit Rails does.
also, Sheon Han(the author), is a corpo-shilling hack that writes predominantly fluff pieces for his silicon valley friends and neighbors.
don’t believe what he writes because he only gets paid when his opinions garner traffic.
want to know why Ruby still has a following? same reason why Java is still holding on. Same reason why COBOL and FORTRAN is still going. because it works and people still use it.
None of the points in the article about the flaws of Ruby are because of Rails. In fact the article says the exact opposite - the only reason Ruby is still relevant is because of Rails!
you’re wrong. none of the points in the article say anything at all. the pillars that hold up the lies are
- ruby is bad because python/js good
- matz is good but DHH is bad and so ruby is bad
- Twitter failed 14 years ago because ruby is bad and so ruby is still bad
- ruby is bad because it’s old
- ruby bad because it’s not used as much as python/js
Sheon Han worked at Twitter. doubtful he was there between the 2011-2014 rewrite. I also doubt that he’s done much of anything with ruby since he was fired from Twitter after Musk destroyed it. especially so since he’s taken up freelance writing since 2021.
Sheon Han is attempting to stay relevant by desperately attacking a language he barely uses and hasn’t touched seriously since at least 2021.
you’re better off ignoring him and “journalists” like him.
ruby is bad because python/js good
Nobody said that.
matz is good but DHH is bad and so ruby is bad
Nobody said that.
Twitter failed 14 years ago because ruby is bad and so ruby is still bad
I don’t think Ruby’s performance has significantly changed since then, so yes. Still bad.
ruby is bad because it’s old
Nobody said that.
ruby bad because it’s not used as much as python/js
Nobody said that.
More straw men than a scarecrow convention.
ruby is bad because python/js good
matz is good but DHH is bad and so ruby is bad
Twitter failed 14 years ago because ruby is bad and so ruby is still bad
ruby is bad because it’s old
ruby bad because it’s not used as much as python/js
More straw men than a scarecrow convention.
did you even read it?
did you even read it?
Yes I read and understood it. :-D
I probably shouldn’t reply since apparently you’re still working on learning how to copy text…
ruby is bad because python/js good
Yes indeed, if you actually read his text, Ruby isn’t bad because Python/JS are good. It’s bad because it has failed to add static type checking. Python and JS are simply examples of languages that didn’t fail in the same way.
matz is good but DHH is bad and so ruby is bad
That quote says absolutely nothing about Matz or DHH making Ruby bad.
ruby is bad because it’s old
No, the text says that Ruby persists despite its badness due to inertia and nostalgia.
How can you accuse me of not reading it when you’re pasting literal quotes that contradict you? Insane.
Paywalled clickbaity trash of an article.
Yep, it’s trash.
Ruby was the most approachable language I found and sheparded me from my limits of bash scripting and Windows batch file scripting into the next level.
The author derides Ruby’s easy readability and syntax because it has issues scaling to large enterprise applications. I don’t disagree there is a performance ceiling, but how many hundreds of thousands of Ruby projects never rose to that level of need? The author is also forgetting that Ruby had Rubygems for easy modular functional additions years before Python eventually got pip.
I don’t write in Ruby anymore, and Python has evolved to be much more approachable than it was when Ruby was in its prime, however if someone came to me today saying they wanted the easier programming language to learn that could build full applications on Linux, OSX, Windows, and the web, I’d still point them to Ruby with the caveat that it would have limits and they would be better served by Python in the long run.
I still prefer perl over either tbh
Hmm, I don’t have too large of a sample size, but I don’t feel like Ruby programs are buggier than Python programs, on average. Not being the language for programming beginners and data scientists, probably aides that impression, though…
Not buggier than Python is a really low bar.
Perhaps, yes. 😅
It was a diplomatic way of saying that I doubt the author’s assessment that Ruby’s tooling is worse than Python’s. Partially, because Python’s tooling has traditionally been terrible (even if it’s been improving in the past two years, from what I hear). But yeah, partially because I do not see Ruby programs being as buggy as they insinuate here…
Not being the language for programming beginners and data scientists, probably aides that impression, though…
I think it was that back when it was relevant (but replace data scientists with web devs)
I never got interested in the ecosystem myself, but I’ve run into it every now and then. I feel like it’s in the same place as PHP today: still used a lot for legacy reasons, but you’ll get weird looks if you start a new project with it and you’re under the age of 40
I think it was that back when it was relevant (but replace data scientists with web devs)
Sure, but if programs from that era are still around, chances are the maintainer is quite experienced by now and has fixed all the funky behaviour. 🙃
I never got interested in the ecosystem myself, but I’ve run into it every now and then. I feel like it’s in the same place as PHP today: still used a lot for legacy reasons, but you’ll get weird looks if you start a new project with it and you’re under the age of 40
Ten years ago, a university buddy of mine discovered Ruby and you might’ve thought a miracle happened from how excited he was for it. But yeah, that was also the last time I met someone in real life who was excited about Ruby. 😅
This mirrors my feelings about Ruby. Especially the lack of type hints. It’s a huge problem when trying to work on large Ruby codebases, e.g. Gitlab or Asciidoctor. Easily doubles the time it takes to get anything done. Sometimes I’ve tried to make a change to Gitlab but had to give up entirely simply because it’s impossible to follow the control flow.
That’s very rarely a problem with statically typed languages. (It can happen with excessive use of interfaces that are resolved at runtime but it’s much less common.)
So aside from Rails I can’t really see any reason to use it over even Python, let alone actually good languages like Rust, Go, Typescript, etc.
