Why Ruby?

blog
81

I’ve just made the exact same trip myself. I picked postgresql and python. When reading this Ruby and Ruby on Rails also look compelling (even took the Rails for Zombies course) but I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got for now.

Since I’m a seasoned developer going on my 16th year of c, c++, vb, c# and many others I don’t really understand the language wars. It takes but a few days or a week to use a new language… basics are the same and the rest is found online.

Many reasons for not choosing c#:

  • I don’t seriously think that MS is promoting open source. Whatever they do it’s for “personal” gain (no harm in that though)
  • c# is meant to run on Windows and while mono works it’s not the same
  • Cheaper hosting for non-MS
  • Better performance for your money on Linux
82

My first ruby program was

puts ‘Nnamdi’

Compared to what I learnt in college to display my name

 public class Displayname { 
    public static void main(String args[]){ 
      System.out.println("Nnamdi");
       }
 }
83

Concerning licensing, its not just software that does that kind of price differentiation. Airlines are masters of it. Business travelers who are buying tickets with someone else’s money just go a head and buys tickets today, whatever the price is. Vacationers spending their own money wait around for seat sales. Business travelers go home on the weekend; personal travelers will stay over a Saturday night to get 50% of the ticket. Thing is, once on the plane, the seats are the same.

Any licensing scheme that provides limits across more than one metric sucks.

OpenSource software has very good licensing (duh), but generally the support contracts are very nice as well. Per-server/cpu-socket: however many users, however much data, whatever features exist, go crazy. Per-user: dev, test, production, run however many boxes you want, go crazy. Per-GB: however many boxes you want, however many user you want, go crazy.

VMWare… VSphere… provides a good example. It was pretty complex, full stop, with bundles and feature-editions. But having chosen the bundle or feature level was per-CPU-socket licensing. Done. Then they decided to change the licensing to be per-CPU, where each of that also was some amount of memory as well. And not some huge amount of memory like 256GB/CPU which won’t matter for 5 years (like the Windows example here), it was something crazy small like 32GB/CPU, which nearly 100% of existing customers had already hit, or were budgeted to hit within the next year or so. Cue massive customer revolt of new-coke proportions.

Not only was it more expensive, it was confusing and impossible to plan for. And especially ironic as VMWare is supposed to make the problem of balancing load over silos of hardware easy. Even with manual ballancing, VMWare solves that… only to replace it with artificial licensing-bound silos. Thanks, retards.

84

In my opinion the software developers must know more than one:

  • Programming language
  • Programming paradigm
  • Tools(IDE, Source Control)

You can not say I can do everything with .Net or with Ruby or with Java, it is depending on the nature of the task.

In some cases I can finish some tasks in new few mintues with .NET in same case I need days to do this task with C++.

I remmber before 15 years ago when the Java came; They have presented like a language to solve all problems with minmum efforts and look to ava now !?

I think:

  • a good programmer must have a knowledge on other langauges and he must be known at least Pro and Cons of programming language.

  • A good programmer must have a knowledge in more then one programming paradigm e.g, OOP, functional programming, etc.

~Alugili

85

Doesn’t Ruby have the highest concentration of “brogrammers?”

86

Google Dart should be a better option than Ruby now.

87

“To all those who say serious software shouldn’t be built with Ruby”

Websites written in Ruby : Twitter, Github, Amazon…

88

@Agu_Nnamdi, exactly! In irb, you can say:

puts "I am genius"

and in ISE (Widows PowerShell), you can say:

"Not really!"

without even “puts”.

@codinghorror, why not redoing StackExchange in Ruby? You may get blessings by all the anti-MSFT trolls out there… and perhaps some kind of a reward too!

Its riding the bandwagon. Anyway you cut it, saying one is better than the other is lame. Its just an utter BS and you know that.

Love technology. If you gotta use it, just use it which one you see fits. Don’t do the farewell speeches on a computer language (!)… Its so stupid “if you squint your eyes a little”, you are just spreading hate and chaos… not really productive… unless you are transformed into someone like:

dotnet.destroy! unless dotnet.belongs_to? :google
  • go haters go go go! and keep going…
89

"Getting up and running with a Microsoft stack is just plain too hard for a developer in, say, Argentina, or Nepal, or Bulgaria"
The corrected one should be “Getting up and running with a Legal Microsoft stack is just plain too hard for a developer in, say, Argentina, or Nepal, or Bulgaria”. Less than 1% are legal softwares here in Nepal. We just love opensource.

91

Ruby is very simple. And fun. It is appropriate language for the word cool.

92

I’m sorry. What? Is Jeff anti-gun control, anti-feminist, and anti T’Pau? Christ…we have less in common than I thought.

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93

Out of interest, (sorry to drag up an old post) but for the javascript parts are you using pure Javascipt / emscipten & C++??

94

The author cracked me up when I read the line "Getting up and running with a Microsoft stack is just plain too hard for a developer in, say, Argentina, or Nepal, or Bulgaria. "
Thought it was even funnier when I saw devs from Bulgaria and Argentina jump in on the comments. Being from Nepal, let me do my share by letting you know that besides Java, MS products are whats used by colleges for education, as well as by companies to build software.
You got it right that they are poorer nations, but MS products aren’t that expensive either :smile:

95

while people in Bulgaria, Argentina or Nepal, all people already poor and exploited enough, may have better to do than working fro free as in beer for people living in richer countries.

Change the world? Just that? Could someone tell how so? Common, some people should come back to earth: software is just one of the multiple human activities among many (thousands of) others, not something the whole world can be confused with (this illusion may be one of the criteria which discriminate between people living in the real world and the others… others which are typically rich and want to tell poorer ones what they should do to help richer people to be happier in their virtual world). If the software world closed on its own world gives the illusions to rich people they can talk like capitalist and communist and the same sentence, that does not mean this really is possible in the real world, which is made of real people who are not eating sotware, not sleeping in software and not opening a software as an umbrella when the rain falls.

97

Everyone loves #opersource why just say, Argentina, or Nepal, or Bulgaria?

98

It looks like Microsoft eventually embraced the open source. It seems to me that choice could renew the .net community. Let’s hope to see great os projects and community spawning within the .net universe

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Looks like, as 2016, a better decision would have been to embrace .NET
I were looking at discourse, and for real, being a ruby and posgre db is the only thing that stops me from using and contributing to it, sadly :frowning:

Interesting, I’m from one of those countries that you said ruby will be better. (Uruguay)

100

may I ask why. is it ruby or rails that bothers you

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.NET core with Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code (Linux) - all free, super easy to setup, integrated debugging and code completion, etc., etc. What advantages does ruby have over this?

When you chose ruby in 2013, mono was a great and viable option for Linux with mono develop. Not sure if you realized this or not…

102

Heyy @codinghorror

I learnt ruby some months ago but I didn’t know what to do with my ruby knowledge. I use to work with PHP as a part of my day job. Then, I fell in love with Discourse and it gave me good reason to stick with ruby.

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