Why Ruby? (codinghorror.com)

Jeff is so 1990ish. Cool hipsters do Erlang and Go nowadays!

    printf "Hello %s" 4

    printf "Hello %s" "wor" "ld!"

    printf "Hello %s! %s" "world"

    printf "%s %s!" "Hello" "world"

Node.js traction is true. As far as I know, Scala newbies are coming back to Java. With Play! and Scooter, Java is more Ruby than Scala. With native compile support Crystal https://github.com/manastech/crystal may soon get all Ruby crowd again.

It's still a long way to go before big enterprisy corporations boring business applications is beeing written in Ruby. As a consultant it's still either Java or .net out there. JavaScript is slowly beeing accepted (you can't avoid it). For hackers Ruby isn't cool, but for consultants Ruby is more than cool enough.

You're seriously happy with all the ,(function(){}){}); verbiage?

Ruby isn't cool anymore? Are startups cool? I think we'd all agree startups are pretty cool.

Going through the HN job postings, my findings are:

Ruby with 6.5 jobs

Python with 4

Java and ObjC each with 2

Node.js and CoffeScript each with 1

Sorry for not sourcing anything, I don't want a massive post. Seems Ruby is still pretty cool. Anyway, this is quite the normal distribution here from my experience. And in the interest of full disclosure -- I am not a Ruby developer.

> If you want to build truly viable open source software, you need people to contribute to your project[...]

I think it would somehow be very hard to get people excited about contributing to the effort to build a new, amazing piece of forum software... in Java.

Clojure, maybe ;)

The problem is choosing a framework for Java. Most of them are just big , unwieldy and force overwrought abstractions and 1000+ line XML files on you.

The big exception is Play! Framework but that seems to have mainly shifted over to the Scala side of things.

    get(new Route("/") {
        @Override
        public Object handle(Request request, Response response) {
            Integer age = request.queryMap("user").get("age").integerValue();
            //do stuff
        }
     });

    @GET @Path("/")    
    public Response get(@QueryParam("user[age]") Integer age) {
        //do stuff
    }

TFA :

> It is thanks to Anders' expert guidance that .NET started out such a remarkably well designed language - literally what Java should have been on every conceivable level

Java and .net/c# are not really that similar any more. Just to pick one example, Java doesn't have an equivalent of LINQ

I'm also curious where Java lands as far as running JRuby on a JVM performance wise. Granted you would need people familiar with running JVM's, which may not be the case with folks that are Rubyists. But it's not like there aren't many choices when it comes to server-side JVM.

I wonder how you fall in to these categories, for instance, Ruby and PHP were developed around the same time (though Rails obviously came later) yet Ruby is such a "cooler language" so it can't be due simply to age.

I think a lot of it is Silicone Valley's attitude to being different to the rest of the world, the majority of sites are built in PHP? Sweet, let's go with something funky and different!

It's a great attitude to have for creating cool new things, I suppose, but it feels like it's moving too fast for me to keep up, is Node.js not cool anymore? What about Backbone? Lua? what the hell is Hadoop? How about a new Lisp?

And as a member of the Ruby community, I welcome you to the conference drama club ;) don't forget, we were there first.

I think no longer being the "hotness" is, frankly, a blessing. Python appears to have thrived and has easily stomped Ruby when it comes to performing certain classes of Serious Work (TM), despite having been absolutely destroyed in the popularity contest war.

I personally like Ruby, and I always have. I'm excited to see how the community evolves over the coming years, even as I work with it less and less (professionally, I am switching to Python).

As member of the programming community, I hereby welcome Python and Ruby to the ranks of technologies that people uniquely associate their identity to!

Has it really joined those ranks? Maybe in Jeff Atwood's bubble Ruby isn't the new hotness anymore but I'm still seeing everyone and their dog gush about how awesome they are for ditching their old and busted language for Ruby. To be clear, I'm not saying Atwood uniquely lives in a bubble, we all do, and I don't mean it in a bad way. Just that maybe the people he's talking to feel that way but it's been my observation that the larger developer community is still all about Ruby for coolness' sake.

He addressed it:

Ruby isn't cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It's not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago. Our project isn't cool, it's just a bunch of boring old Ruby code. Personally, I'm thrilled that Ruby is now mature enough that the community no longer needs to bother with the pretense of being the coolest kid on the block. That means the rest of us who just like to Get Shit Done can roll up our sleeves and focus on the mission of building stuff with our peers rather than frantically running around trying to suss out the next shiny thing.

(edit: formatting)

I think, what he meant to say by that, is that the forum is more of a browser app unlike your traditional forum software.

I think that "node.js" is excelent for build real-time applications in a few days but for huge projects is a little difficult to handle all the "callback-style" and async results, IMHO it's about readable code , a key factor in developer teams.

And the language simply isn't as good, IMHO. The ecosystem and the runtime may be better in numerous ways (the "node" part of "node.js" is also superb) and it may be fun to develop in, but that's in spite of the language. As a pure language JS isn't just up with Python, Ruby, C# or the like yet IMHO but progress is being made on this front (and even if it doesn't, things like asm.js, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, and Dart give us options.)

Although I love node.js, but you are missing out on not using Ruby. I used both Ruby (eventmachine) and node.js on a recent project and it was a total awesomegasm. I admit that the Ruby side had some Ruby code converted to C for performance reasons (parsing binary blobs), but we are not rubysts because performance is the only thing we care about. I find Ruby incredibly sexy, be it still cool or not.

Ok, now you are ready for ruby

Turbo Pascal 7.0

Turbo Pascal!

> Anders is the only one of them who built Turbo Pascal and Delphi

http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/32659364988/turbo...

Since I'm leaving links to my blog, here's another relevant one: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/43394068341/rubys...

Turbo Pascal, one of the best Pascal dialects with fast compilation times, modules and everything you need for doing systems programming.

The IDE was also quite good for the time.

It was my favorite programming language until I was forced into C and C++ land.

Nowadays I am just another polyglot developer, but the Pascal family of languages has a special place on my heart.

I think the software would be safer would one language of that family be the default systems language for mainstream operating systems.

Play with Java or Scala? What did you think about it?

Topaz won't help for the case you describe.

The big problem with bundle exec (or Ruby startup times in general), is the ludicrous amount filesystem access because of searching through a ridiculous large number of files for each "require". E.g. if you have a ton of gem's installed, most "require" calls will look for the files you require relative to the root of every gem....

Much more extensive use of require_relative, and fewer search paths can fix that entirely.

Try an "strace 2>&1 -e last64,stat64,lstat,stat bundle exec [yourcommand] | less" and be prepared to be shocked at the waste.

(EDIT: This of course assumes you have strace; on most Linux distro's that's just a package install away - I don't know about OS X, and I've got no idea how to make dtrace do the same)

   $ sudo dtruss -d -f script/rails server

For our use even assembly does not "rip Ruby apart.", looking at our 2 most common pages, topic list page and topic page, 30-50% of the time is still spent in SQL. Ruby 2.0 bring decent launch times to Rails (important for dev) due to the fixes falcon committed. Overall, the execution engine itself is pretty sweet and we have incredible visibility into the inner workings with flame graphs http://samsaffron.com/archive/2013/03/19/flame-graphs-in-rub... .

There is plenty of optimisation work left to do, but the vast majority of the issues we encounter can be addresses in either the application or libraries.

Sure, Google Go is much faster, no arguing there. Python and PyPy oth would be ballpark similar to Ruby 2.0 these days from benches I have seen.

Rails is the biggest offender in terms of startup speed, which I've noticed much more since I started playing with Padrino. But you're right; there's still a lot that could be done to improve speed.

Ironically, CRuby 2.0 has a much better GC, so it should perform much better than CPython.

Check out Crystal.

If you're a Ruby developer, do yourself a favour and buy a SSD drive. It makes a huuuuuge difference !

Just as a note: by default any modern rails app is going to call Bundler.require, so you only need to use bundle exec if e.g. your system rake is a different version or your system rails is not 3+. I've heard claims that this can have non-trivial performance effects.

You never need to run `bundle exec rails x`, just run `rails x`. Rails specifically does a lot of work so that you don't have to. For more: http://blog.wyeworks.com/2011/12/27/bundle-exec-rails-execut...

Are you using bundle exec instead of binstubs because you don't know about binstubs, or because you like things going slow?

I agree completely with your anecdotal experience. It has been my experience as well.

However, I'm quite sure that the speed difference we've observed here is not due to the language implementations at the interpreter level. The two languages are similar in performance in that respect (Python being maybe incrementally faster, but not enough to notice most of the time). The faster speed noticed in this anecdote has got to be almost entirely due to the superior efficiency of the code in the tools we're using. Bundle is just slow basically.

You're talking about startup time, which is bad in this case because of the overhead Rubygems introduces by adding loads of directories to the require load path. Pre-rubygems, everything lived in a traditional $PREFIX/lib/ruby/{,site-ruby/}$VERSION/ directory just like Perl and Python, and startup times were much more comparable.

Atwood is talking about general runtime performance, and comparing it with the fast, mature JITed VMs that drive CLR languages. Python (and indeed other languages in its class) compare just as badly there.

JRuby is really cool, however whenever I tried using it, well it was painful. It's not JRuby's fault as the devs did a phenomenal job on making it a first-class Ruby implementation, but you always have issues with its startup time added on top of the already awful startup time of Bundler/Rails, or with incompatibilities with libraries, or with libraries behaving differently or being incomplete on top JRuby versus Ruby MRI, or with instances in which you have to mix Maven or Jars with Bundler / RubyGems and so on.

In the end, for new projects if you want to use the JVM, it's way better to use a language that was grown on top of the JVM. Like Scala or Clojure, or maybe even Java 8 when it comes out. Which is exactly what I personally did, being tired of the limitations that the reference Python/Ruby interpreters have.

not the case for us, Ruby 1.9.3 outperformed latest JRuby for us. Ruby 2.0 completely smoked it (and with GC tuning and tcmalloc even more), we leverage a fair amount of native gems, like the oj json serializer and fast_xs. Trouble is we would need Java implementations of some key bits of functionality.

Now I love Charlie's work and would port to JRuby in a blink if it was faster. But as it is now, for us, it is not.

Phusion Passenger 4 supports JRuby (and Rubinius): http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/10/30/phusion-passenger-4-0-supp...

syntax is not the only thing behind language design. at all.

the semantics of a language are equally (if not more) important.

you also need to recognise the importance of a good compiler, one which gives good error messages and optimises your code.

TurboPascal departed a lot from standard Pascal syntax, especially in very popular versions 5.5 and 6. IIRC, standard Pascal didn't even support modularity (importing symbols from other files). Pascal was mostly academia language, suitable for learning imperative programming (Wirth later designed Modula-2, which was capable for industry). TP 5.5 introduced OO, pretty much what we see as Java-style mainstream these days. Also, the IDE itself was incredibly nice to work with. Not to mention Delphi.

Actually the syntax comes from Algol, but Wirth was also part of the design team.

> .NET is not a language.

It may as well be. VB.net and C# are the only .NET languages that have any traction, and the differences between them are almost entirely superficial. Off the top of my head, the only significant difference is that VB.net supports inline XML.

Being from Bulgaria: .net is widely used over here. Most of the companies that I've worked for do relay heavily on MS stuff.

This part seems to have given peace of mind to so many ruby avoiding people. Now you can finally discover ruby. You'll finally find out it's cool :)

Ruby != Ruby on Rails

> Why not mono?

Surely you jest?

He is obviously concerned about adoption of the project by wider circle of potential contributors. Most of the C#/.NET developers are already working in, well, C# and .NET, usually in enterprisey environments and often with little or no contact with open-source community. Also (and this is purely my own subjective view, of someone who worked 5+ years almost exclusively with .NET, before switching completely to OSS stack and Ruby) Mono feels like a second-class platform, orbiting around .NET. I personally wouldn't like to work in Mono as it feels a bit like betraying both realms, OSS and MS, regardless of how good the platform itself and the tools are. And I believe that at least VS can't be replaced that easily with OSS alternatives.

That's addressed in his third point, the ecosystem isn't as good as other options.

Good luck! I can't wait to be in the same boat. :)

Their architecture has been pretty well documented, and can and has handled a good amount of traffic with relatively small resources - http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-arch...

Without evidence to the contrary that claim seems reasonable: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

We all know CPU performance is much less important than IO performance (file, DB, network), but assuming a large Ruby site and large .NET site both got that part right, and CPU performance does start to matter, what he says sounds reasonable.

Rather than being noticeably faster (lower latency) for a single user, the compiled tier (Java,C#,Go,Haskell,Scala,etc)'s better performance often just allows for far fewer (or cheaper) servers than the interpreted tier (PHP,Perl,Ruby,Python) to be thrown at the problem.

Just to elaborate further on why I think this is a throwaway comment from Atwood rather than getting into the whole "one language is faster than another" dick-measuring competition:

"Fast" in the context of the Internet is incredibly subjective (especially when you factor in global network latency), and has no place in technical discussion unless backed up with benchmarks (and even then, to be taken with a pinch of salt). For example, think about these made-up statements:

1. "Our site is really fast."

2. "That site is faster than the other site."

3. "We made our site 10% faster."

4. "We build our site using language X because it's fast."

I'm sorry, but statements like that raise my bullshit firewall. It's bordering on marketing speak.

Jeff claims that they want to make the Ruby install story as easy as PHP's (e.g. download and unzip into a directory accessible via mod_php). I'd love to see that happen but it strikes me as a bit of a risk to their business. I guess Jeff is independently wealthy already, though his team may not be.

I'm sure he talks about server response times.

He's talking purely server times here. And it shouldn't be pages so much as "JSON Blobs" :)

While not sexy and hip, remember 35 percent of web traffic is handled by PHP... PHP is still a player. I'm not a huge fan of either PHP or Ruby, but with HipHop PHP apps seems to have a path to higher scalability. All languages eventually decline and die, and while PHP might be declining (and as of this year maybe Ruby too) PHP's death is going to be extremely slow, probably decades. In 30 years I would not be surprised if PHP is the COBOL of web development.