Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It's worth remembering that the trolls that complain about Ruby do so because they care about it.

You'll often see the same names coming back on every post to angrily insist that no one is interested in Ruby

...apart from them obviously because if they didn't they would be busy trolling something else. :P



> It's worth remembering that the trolls that complain about Ruby do so because they care about it.

I don't think so. I mean there are complains about stuff you care about like people complaining about Healthcare. (edit: there are other forms of caring, see my grandchild comment)

Dissing on Ruby is definitely not this, they are not Ruby users wanting Ruby to be better. They don't even know Ruby apart from dissing on it is socially accepted, and makes them feel good.


Usually people get huffed up about stuff they care about. Caring doesn’t mean wanting it to be better, it could also mean get worked up about.

Surely a one-off comment about nobody using Ruby doesn’t mean you “care”, but if it is true that it is the same people who keep commenting, they obviously care.

Is it because they are jealous of the beauty of Ruby/Rails, as a Rubyist I’d think so, but who is to say really. Maybe they worked at a company where they replaced whatever their favourite stack is with Rails and they have hated Ruby ever since. It could be anything.

You wouldn’t keep responding to stuff you don’t care about at some level.


Equating caring and wanting it to be better was a mistake on my part. It made my comment not true, and it made you worked-up. Sorry for that.

All in all, I don't think that other forms of caring apply either. I think that parroting "Ruby is dead" doesn't mean that they care about Ruby, it's just a thing people like to parrot, without the meaning realizing in their heads. A form of bonding, a form of distraction, a form of opening to a social interaction, a form of self-reassurance etc. It is lot of things, and caring about Ruby at all is usually not among those (IMO).


Haha I am not worked up. I just care it seems.

I agree. Parroting some meme isn’t caring per se. But I was working under the assumption that the statement that it was the same names who keep doing it. If you say “Ruby is dead” 5 times a year it isn’t necessarily “caring” if it becomes 100 times a year there is something else at play.


Chaotic neutral take: they're Ruby devs that have a vested interest in gatekeeping newcomers from the language so they have better job security


No, they complain about it because they care about web development... That should be obvious.


I'm not sure what your point is. I care about Ruby and want it to die because I have worked on the Gitlab codebase, which is written in Ruby. It's a bad language and it stopped me being able to understand behaviours and fix bugs.

In contrast I have also worked on VSCode which is similarly huge but written in Typescript. Faaaar easier to work with, enough that I've been able to contribute a couple of medium sized features and several bug fixes.

So when people say "yeay Ruby" I try to discourage them because I don't want more Ruby code in the world that I might have the misfortune of having to interact with in future.


I think you are confusing the beauty and elegance of the language with the crap thatpeople write.

My experience is that the sort of folks who misuse Ruby's powerful features are the sort of idiotes who dont realise that because a thing can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done. These are the sort of people who are capable of misusing most languages.


Was it really idiomatic ruby that "stopped you from being unable to understand behaviors"? Or was it unorganized monkey patching?

I'm having a hard time thinking that ruby is difficult to understand, particularly compared to its opposites lisp, erlang, Haskell, e.g. languages that are extremely simple to the point where the burden of complexity is shoved into code space.


> Was it really idiomatic ruby that "stopped you from being unable to understand behaviors"?

I think so. I'm not an expert but the Gitlab codebase seems like fairly typical Ruby to me.


IIRC Github was originally written in Ruby as well.

Now that they use something "far easier to work with", the UX gets to suffer accordingly.

I've never been in a situation where making the customer happy was synonymous with applying best practices to the tech stack or otherwise making it so everyone and their dog can contribute.


Github is still rails, but they have layered in some react to the UIs, like the file explorer.

It all seems pretty negative value to me though it’s terribly slow.


Yeah Codeberg is significantly faster than GitHub, presumably in part because it's Go and not Ruby.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: