The deeper reason I think it's a bad argument is because twitter ran into a problem native and new to them - massive fan out (celebrity tweet -> millions of followers). that's not the kind of thing any language typically does while responding to a web request.
Lastly - heavy survivorship bias here. We will never hear about all the startups which were "scalable from day 1" on java or whatever and fizzled out.
Looking at https://www.wired.com/author/sheon-han/, this author's whole strategy seems to be bear poking. The writer is skilled but at least in this ruby one they are definitely hate-farming. I'm a little sad to see content of this quality in Wired.
Anyway, I'm off. Returning to be part of the usually silent majority who is happily using ruby to ship useful software!
Popular python projects like requests and flask also lean into the idea of providing a programmer interface that is expressive but also maximally brief on the happy path—see especially the context local proxies in Flask (request, session); these look like global module imports, but they're actually request specific despite not being passed into your handlers... eek.
On the other side of things, languages like zig and go feel like a bit of a backlash to this, that no, magic is bad and everything should be explicit, even if it costs us a bit of code to do so.
Rust I think sits at an interesting place in this, because it's all pretty strict and explicit, but all the macro and type system stuff does re-open the door to offering some DSL-like things in a way that's perhaps a bit cleaner than what other languages would have to do to get to the same place programmer interface-wise.
It is not "I like to write code in this language" but "If I am handed down a production ready system, I would prefer it to be written in this language".
A lot of people won't say the same answer to the first and the second question.
That said - this response and the critique seem to basically agree. The critique can be summed up as "Ruby doesn't work forever" (and so it should never be used) and this is saying "Ruby doesn't work forever" (which is fine). I could almost understand this post as saying: 'Ruby isn't serious and that's not a problem for anyone who uses it.'
I will say that I found it funny that the original article attacked Ruby for being all the way down at "18th place" (This is inaccurate - it's 14th in 2024) on the SO dev survey - while talking up Scala which is 9 places further down on the survey[1].
[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...
Where does the response even address this?
All I know is that Ruby code I wrote 10ish years ago is still going strong, for example a whole compiler https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/tree/main/Source/JavaScript...
> critics love the Twitter example. But look closer. Ruby carried them further than most companies will ever reach. They outgrew their shoes. That’s not an indictment… that’s success.
> I’ve never seen a team fail because they chose Ruby. I have seen them fail because they chose complexity. Because they chose indecision.
> GitHub held the world’s source code together for years using Ruby.
There are many examples of companies that used Ruby at one point very successfully but moved on from it once it no longer fit their situation. This isn't a critique of Ruby! But it is agreeing that Ruby can be outgrown and that, if you are looking to start with a language your usecase probably won't ever outgrow, Ruby might not be the best choice.
I went from rarely even noticing any lag to it being borderline unusable.
Yet another proof that you shouldn't use what's popular on LinkedIn to get a promotion.
I don’t care about what’s popular or what feels most familiar. What I want is a dispassionate discussion of how different language features impact code quality, and I think you can only find that in more abstract discussions. The kind that turns people off with its talk of monads and applicatives.
This can be difficult because code quality, productivity, safety are hard to objectively define and measure, so we always fall back to differences in interpretation and experience.
I think we can start disagreeing here.
The metrics shouldn't be solely code quality, but also simplicity, readability, and how fast you can express yourself in it.
Code quality will go up the more language friction you add: types, "one way" of doing things, and function-oriented programming. Same code in a language with heavy types and strict functions will be of course "more solid". However, it will take 10x the time to write, be less flexible, and harder to understand.
Not in my experience: only in the usual ramp-up period in the first few months.
Most posts I can think of basically say "X language is good" or "Y language is bad", but I'd really be interested in arguments like "feature A is better at accomplishing goal Z than feature B"
Large project have much code but if you can split out responsibility because your architecture allows this, then you keep your code concise.
One feature Ruby has that helps here is creating Domain Specific Language without yacc or lex. This allows for concise code where its needed.
I do feel like these sorts of attacks on ruby are quite weird. It's totally ok not to enjoy working in any particular programming language, but I wonder what the angle is to write about it is.
Arguments regarding ruby's successes are always so weird to me. Github, Twitter, Coinbase, and Shopify are all examples of great success. Challenges with scaling are successful problems.
It's a great tool and if you read this, consider and evaluate if ruby is appropriate for your next project. :)
I love Ruby but too many companies assume I said Rails. I would also never recommend Rails for anything.
Instead I’d use Sinatra and Ruby any day.
It is beyond stupid to continue to act like "it doesn't scale" is a real argument. Not every application is or will ever be Twitter.
But yeah, that was 20 years ago. These days I find Kotlin to be the perfect fit for my projects, because of the static typing and its ergonomic syntax. I just don't feel confident about Ruby projects when they start growing. But, I still love the language, although mostly for small things.
Now some people won't fault the language for that, but it feels like a footgun and I've noticed a trend that often the worst (I.e. most dangerous) gravitate toward languages with the fewest safeties in them (less type safety, no compile checks, no memory safety, little concurrency safety, less safety around shared state)
Edit: I forgot that Java has implicit `this`! That's so, so much worse!
But the closest we have in any popular programming language, certainly.
I am entirely indifferent to the topic of Ruby, but this sentence really resonated with me. I'll take momentum over premature optimization for scale any day of the week.
Ruby arose and became popular because it caters to a niche that was underserved by the competitors of the time (and while I'm no historian, I think Rails had a big role to play in Ruby's popularity).
Ruby is very ergonomic, and so is Rails. Frankly, almost 10 years after moving on from it, ActiveRecord is the yardstick by which I measure the ergonomics of all other ORMs in other languages, but what ergonomic means will vary from domain to domain.
With languages like Ruby and Python, it's very easy to get from nothing to an app that will work generally well enough almost straight away. A lightweight syntax, a lot of implicit functionality, and a flexible type system are all great for that, but in my current niche, I couldn't use it (I currently work with Rust, and the explicit control is a huge selling point, despite the much heavier syntax and more complicated semantics). That doesn't mean Rust was built without the human experience of using it in mind, though, and arguably the opposite's true.
It is a joy to write Ruby, I’ll give you that, but it is a pain to live around other people’s Ruby at scale.
Back then, Ruby and Rails opened a lot of people's minds to the idea that we were allowed to make "delightful" a consideration in API design, not just S.O.L.I.D. or whatever. These days, there are way more mainstream languages, frameworks, and communities that take humane APIs seriously.
Uh how?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)#Se...
For all its problems, the presence of AI feels like it should solve some of these quibbles for the vast majority of people who program. I can't quite put my finger on why just yet, though.
It's something different. To say that it'll be _better_ relative to some stated measurement is fine.
Let's use a driving analogy. You can say cars get you from point A to point B so self-driving and teleportation are better evolutions. But you wouldn't say if someone wanted drive a car, enjoyed driving a car, wanted to get better at driving a car, they should get in a Waymo. Or teleport.
Even if you vibe code an entire system, a human will eventually have to read and modify the vibe code. Most likely in order to refactor the whole thing, but even if by some miracle the overall quality is alright, somebody will have to review the code and fix bugs. The programming language and it's ecosystem will always be a factor in that case.
The mistake that most folks make. They start out using RoR and think that’s Ruby.
That’s probably why Ruby will always remain a “web” language and won’t be taken _seriously_ in other areas.
It’s this ridiculous conceit and arrogance that in some way (never quantified mind you), that makes people want to bring the Ruby conceit back to earth.
That’s why Ruby gets attacked - because it’s nothing special but the Ruby lovers club all claim it is.
Culture maybe, but business rewards what make business going on. Only that and Ruby proved that it can make businesses start and keep them going on. The few ones that exceed the capabilities of the runtime had to pivot to something else, in part or completely, but would we had a Twitter if they started coding in pick-your-favorite-serious-language? Maybe a competitor would have overrun them. We'll never know.
What I know for sure is that Ruby has been paying my bills for nearly 20 years. That's more than any other language I used, serious or not serious. It worked for me.
Enshitification is a very rewarding strategy, depending on which side of it you're on, and I think you'd struggle to argue that's, 'The resonant. The clear. The human. The work that connects.'
The fact of that matter is that business and culture reward a vast range of different approaches in different contexts, and this holds over multiple levels of abstraction. From the sort of staff you want in particular jobs, all the way through to your position as a company relative to the market. Do you want your payroll admin to be playful? Really getting down, feeling that vibe - pay them whatever man - it's all in the vibe dude? Or do you want them to do their job to a standard? Do you want your impression as a company producing finance software to be that you're all about the resonant, the clear, the human, the work that connects? Or do you want it to be that you help the organisation meet its audit burden?
And just as business rewards different things in different contexts - so does programming. I'm not going to do low level systems programming in Ruby. I'm not going to go and do graphics programming in Rust. I'm not going to engage in banging out a CRUD app in C. You choose the best tool for the job given what's reasonably accessible to you at the time the problem occurs. Sometimes it's because a particular language gives you good access and support to a set of libraries - sometimes it's because the code you're working with was already written in that language. Sometimes the features of the language are well suited to particular tasks.
It's not a matter of the tool being serious or not. People are serious or not. Languages are just things and what makes the language serious when you pick it up is whether you're approaching your work seriously or not.
> Arguing about definitions is a garden path; people wouldn’t go down the path if they saw at the outset where it led.
See [1] for some tips on moving past the fruitless arguments:
> Personally I’d say that if the issue arises, both sides should switch to describing the event in unambiguous lower-level constituents ...
> ... Or each side could designate a new word, like ‘alberzle’ and ‘bargulum,’
> ... and then both sides could use the new words consistently. That way neither side has to back down or lose face, but they can still communicate.
> And of course you should try to keep track, at all times, of some testable proposition that the argument is actually about.
> Does that sound right to you?
however the success of rails was also its biggest albatross. Ruby though fine for system tasks (such as system automation etc, chef existed yeah - but we haven't seen new gen tools built after) - people forgot it could do those.
the other is failure of certain sjws to separate say dhh the programmer vs the person. & not being aware to how money (velocity & gravity) move the world e.g shopify involvement in the ruby ecosystem.
failure to understand that beginners are the lifeblood of an ecosystem - till this date don't know if ruby can be effectively used on windows. most people have windows machines not mac's or linux boxes.
it didn't fail cz it was too slow (its fast enough)
That aside, while I'm "old" enough to remember this kind of cultural/vibe-based rivalry between programming language communities, and read enough to know it predates the greyest of living greybeards (TIMTOWTDI vs the Zen of Python, "Real Programmers Don't Write Pascal", "BASIC considered harmful"), I am not sure that this works any more as an argument.
It's a bit tone-deaf to suggest that the difference between Ruby and other communities is that Rubyists are the (only?) ones who care about "how code feels"; that's a pretty core part of the sales pitch for every PL I've ever seen promoted. I am actually nervously awaiting the first big PL that advertises on the basis of "you may not like it, but LLMs love it".
I suspect the real problem is that data science + ML/AI drove (roughly) a bajillion people to Python and LLM training corpus makeup will keep them there. Meanwhile all the Rubyists (ok, I'm being a little inflammatory) that cared about performance or correctness went to Rust (or had already left for Erlang or Haskell or Elm or... whatever). Who's left over there in the dynamic-types-or-bust Ruby world? DHH? (Not an uncontroversial figure these days.)
If this isn't AI slop it's certainly badly written.
The idea that caring about how your programs feel to write or read is somehow “different” seems weird to me. I don’t write Ruby so maybe I just don’t appreciate this difference.
But I mean, I write fun-to-write, silly little experiments in Octave, Fortran, and Python… I don’t know if anyone would enjoy reading them, but I don’t really see how a language could prevent you from finding joy in programming (other than Java of course /s).
By saddling the writer with tons of syntax and gotchas that is hard to keep at the top of his mind when trying to create.
Languages like c++ and java might be powerful, but there are so many hurdles that are between start and end that unless you are proficient in the language or have a desire to learn the language, it's very tempting to just give up.
Languages like ruby and python are not fast, but their syntax is so straight forward, the effort to go from a to z is a fraction of other languages, leading to the developer to be able to deliver faster.
From the point of view of a developer that loves to learn, simpler languages inspire me to learn more complex languages, which in turn gives me more opportunity to enjoy my chosen craft.
Ruby does a lot of magic stuff to help beginners. That means the semantics are unclear. IMO this is similar to how Apple optimizes UI/UX for first impressions to drive sales. The journeyman user is neglected, simple things are easy to do, but the most powerful features are missing for journeyman and advanced users.
I'm not saying Ruby is a bad language. Just saying that I have the opposite view. I too love to learn, but Ruby did not help me learn, it actively got in my way.
You can make a simple language without confusing semantics, see Go, C, python.
In practice this means I don’t use Ruby professionally any more, because there aren’t a lot of non-Rails Ruby jobs. And since I write a lot of python at work, that’s my go-to for my own quick little personal scripts, too, just for simplicity’s sake as far as what I have to keep in “working memory”, if you will. Plus it’s already installed on most systems I touch, unlike Ruby.
Like I do care about how “joyful” a language is but I also care about how hard it is to work with if a codebase has been through a bunch of contractors’ and agencies’ hands and it’s kind of a mess and the test suite hasn’t been updated during two full years of active development. For my own “joy”’s sake, give me Go or c# or maybe even Java if you must, under those circumstances. It’s unlikely I’ll find much joy in Ruby when that’s happened, which is often.
Ruby was not designed to be a serious language. It was designed to be fun like PHP but not ugly like PHP. Meanwhile PHP grew up and Ruby grew out.
It's okay to love a thing and realize that it has some unsolvable issues and some people around it destined to keep it that way. Most things are like that these days.