Is Ruby On Rails Losing Steam?

How about over 10 years? by EMG+at+MU · 2014-11-26 04:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.

Re:How about over 10 years? by BreakBad · 2014-11-26 04:35 · Score: 1

..to find the lowest paid programmers and hire them to program in the highest paid language at a discount. I only say this because PHP is not on the list.
Re:How about over 10 years? by jones_supa · 2014-11-26 04:36 · Score: 1

That was 20 years ago.
Re:How about over 10 years? by geekmux · 2014-11-26 04:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.
We can cram the internet boom, a dot-com bubble, a dot-com crash, 9/11, the birth of DHS, and a rather massive banking failure that almost crashed the entire global economy inside a span of 10 years.
With factors like that going on all around your number, I'm not quite sure what value you can expect out of your salary stats. The only thing we've managed to sustain over the last 10 years is chaos. IT is hardly immune.
Re: How about over 10 years? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 04:45 · Score: 1

10 years ago there was PHP, and Java, and JavaScript. 10 years later, you still can't write anything web without HTML, it's just not "cool" to say so.
Re:How about over 10 years? by Lunix+Nutcase · 2014-11-26 05:15 · Score: 5, Funny

That's never fazed an HR department.
Re:How about over 10 years? by jambox · 2014-11-26 05:19 · Score: 1

Come now, it's not as if that will ever happen again...

"Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rainforest scare a few years back: our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?"

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Re:How about over 10 years? by lgw · 2014-11-26 06:16 · Score: 1

With factors like that going on all around your number, I'm not quite sure what value you can expect out of your salary stats
Software developers who don't work on web UI frontend stuff: infrastructure and systems programmers, kernel developers, and so on, were barely affected by all that. 2007-08 was rough for everyone, but even then it wasn't that bad for us backend devs.
Now, if your expertise was DB internals, hard cluster internals, or user-mode storage software, those fields have gradually faded over the past decade, but many of us just moved on to the new hotness: the backend for the cloud, and massively parallel systems that can run in the cloud (external or internal).

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Re: How about over 10 years? by davester666 · 2014-11-26 06:43 · Score: 1

...because you don't "write" html. you get something else to write it for you.

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Re: How about over 10 years? by __aaclcg7560 · 2014-11-26 06:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

Hand coding your own HTML pages is a lost art these days.
Re: How about over 10 years? by tbannist · 2014-11-26 07:09 · Score: 1

Much like making your own shoes and it's a lost art for similar reasons.

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Re: How about over 10 years? by __aaclcg7560 · 2014-11-26 07:24 · Score: 1

If you know how to hand code HTML, you can determined what went wrong with the HTML that another program spits out. As a QA tester at one company in the late 1990's, I wrote many tickets for the website team to fix the HTML that Dreamweaver and FrontPage generated.
Re:How about over 10 years? by Tablizer · 2014-11-26 07:26 · Score: 1

They just ask for 15 years of experience in R&R regardless....and get it (per claims).
Several coders once told me, "you gotta learn to lie better" when I was struggling to find a new gig. Dealing with HR is a game.

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Table-ized A.I.
Re:How about over 10 years? by houstonbofh · 2014-11-26 07:31 · Score: 1

They just ask for 15 years of experience in R&R regardless....and get it (per claims).
That's ok. They are "Billable" years.
Re: How about over 10 years? by nickittynickname · 2014-11-26 07:35 · Score: 1

More than ever it's important to have complete control over your HTML structure. We need to cater to more browsers and screen sizes than ever. Sure, templates you only write once, but you still need to re-template or rewrite new components. For redesigns, css isn't to a point that html structure doesn't matter so it's still important to reorder elements or change nesting. If your talking about point and click tools, I've never found them to be as quick as a good IDE with code completion.
Re: How about over 10 years? by Bob+Gelumph · 2014-11-26 07:38 · Score: 1

HTML is trivial though. There's almost nothing to it, unless you're including JavaScript, which opens up more possibilities.

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Re: How about over 10 years? by __aaclcg7560 · 2014-11-26 08:26 · Score: 1

You have obviously never dealt with designers who couldn't write HTML to get themselves out of a paperbag. Over ten years ago, most web designers were graphic artists who could use either Dreamweaver or FrontPage. Show them trivial HTML, they saw alphabit soup.
Re: How about over 10 years? by Bob+Gelumph · 2014-11-26 08:36 · Score: 1

You're talking about designers. The thread is about programming.

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Re: How about over 10 years? by __aaclcg7560 · 2014-11-26 08:50 · Score: 1

The thread was about programs that generated HTML code. Over ten years ago, Dreamweaver and FrontPage produced horrible HTML. As someone else pointed, people don't write HTML anymore because another program generates it for them.
Re: How about over 10 years? by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 08:55 · Score: 1

If you know how to hand code HTML, you can determined what went wrong with the HTML that another program spits out. As a QA tester at one company in the late 1990's, I wrote many tickets for the website team to fix the HTML that Dreamweaver and FrontPage generated.
If you have custom made shoes, your cobbler can take those shoes apart in a few years, determine which parts took the most wear, and replace them. You get a shoe that is better than new, with the broken-in parts that didn't wear still in place. That makes for a better than new fit. And the new fit on a custom shoe is already pretty awesome.
There are still people doing it, there is even a local cobbler who will teach people to make their own shoes at home, in exchange for making 1 pair of shoes for him to sell in his store. That is the bottom end, though. I was pricing some custom shoes and there are a number of people doing it in the $3000-5000 range.
I still hand-code much of my HTML. But it absolutely does NOT bring the advantages it used to. The frameworks produce polished output these days.
Re: How about over 10 years? by nblender · 2014-11-26 09:40 · Score: 1

HTML is trivial to learn. I use "" and "" for everything. I used "" once... I also used "" once too but that was a stretch goal.
Re: How about over 10 years? by nblender · 2014-11-26 09:42 · Score: 3, Funny

oh crap.

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HTML is trivial to learn. I use "<pre>" and "</pre>" for everything. I used "<img>" once... I also used "<blink>" once too but that was a stretch goal
Re:How about over 10 years? by rtb61 · 2014-11-26 11:43 · Score: 2

You are like that farmer that whines when they get paid bugger all for a crop that raked in huge profits for the few farmers that planted it last season, just like all the other farmers that switched to the high profit crop.
Demand does not function on it's off but is a partner with supply. When supply fails to meet demand, price rises and when supply exceeds demand price drops. There was an interesting period where old cobol programmers were paid heaps, not because there was growing demand but because no one was learning the language and supply of skilled coders had dropped right off and although very little new code was written, existing code had to be maintained.
A tricky point on the supply side, the easier the language is to learn and use, the more readily coders will learn it and of course the greater the supply. You also have to be careful with regard to the realistic stabilisation of applications. Change in applications now is largely driven by greed, with forced incompatibilities created purposefully to require purchasing the same software over and over again, they toss in some GUI changes to create the public relations illusion of a better product. Eventually this is going to hit a real wall, customers will no longer accept fake upgrades that waste huge sums in licence fees, retraining costs, installation costs and hardware upgrades, all with zero new benefit to the customer.

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Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Re: How about over 10 years? by jwhitener · 2014-12-01 13:10 · Score: 1

...because you don't "write" html. you get something else to write it for you.

Hand coding your own HTML pages is a lost art these days.
What sort of systems are you guys involved with that you don't have to manually modify HTML structure to line up with what your CSS/JS guys need or want?
Some HTML output is automated, but you still need a thorough understanding of what the HTML tag options are, what needs to be in the HEAD section, the overall flow of the page html for ADA checking, etc..
I use php, java/jsp, coldfusion, velocity templates/Liferay portal type systems, etc.. and still need to carefully think about html structure in my projects. What sort of workflow using what sort of framework/language allows you to produce a finished and styled web application without tinkering with HTML tags?

Everyone hates Ruby by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 04:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

Whether or not you believe it was the world's most hipster programming language, they tried to sell it as a license to print money. And it is so clearly not. All the businesses with any real money either roll their own languages for in-house challenges, opt for something off the shelf and easy to recruit for, or have mountains of legacy code that merely needs to be maintained.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 04:40 · Score: 5, Informative

Why is the parent modded down?
It's a very accurate description of real world Ruby on Rails apps.
Many adopters have been badly burned by this software, and the people who pushed it.
Failed projects, slow and broken apps, and fleeing developers are the hallmarks of Ruby on Rails.
It's much worse than Java was in the early 2000s, or C++ in the 1990s, or C and COBOL before that.
Ruby on Rails sounds great, until you try to use an app written in it, or worse, until you have to deal with a Rubyist. Then everything tends to go to hell.
Re: Everyone hates Ruby by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 04:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

Normal people, including programmers, just got tired of dealing with the Ruby crowd. No normal person wants to deal with smug, "opinionated", Zed Shaw-inspired hipsters who swear all the time, and who also often exhibit an unusual disdain for women. It's even worse when, despite all their talk and hype about how great Ruby and Rails are, they still wrote worse software than the well-mannered and normal PHP, Java and Python programmers.
Re:Everyone hates Ruby by maligor · 2014-11-26 05:55 · Score: 2

I would _never_ agree to work for a business which chooses the wrong tool for the job because said tool is "cool". Either they use an appropriate language, of I choose which language to use.
Virtually all Ruby shops fit into that first statement - wrong tool for the job, but do it because it's "cool".
Interesting, I don't personally care much about languages unless it's just plain bad idea in terms of performance, like say doing scientific HPC on pure interpreted python. If someone wants to pay me to reinvent the virtual wheel, I don't really mind. The language itself is just a tool, and having used C for almost 20 years now, I still tend to lookup standard function calls from the man. It's not like using a different language would be any different aside from missing man pages.
I do wonder if people hate languages because their favorite IDE Product X doesn't support Language Y. My favorite "IDE" is called vim, it's not too hard to add language support to it, but it will take decent chunk of time.
Re: Everyone hates Ruby by TheRaven64 · 2014-11-26 07:23 · Score: 2

Indeed. I always found it entertaining to see what was going on in Ruby-land: concepts from 20-30 years ago that other languages had explored (and often discarded having discovered major issues with them) being touted as new and shiny and one of the reasons why Ruby is great. Rails itself is something of an example of this: NeXT's WebObjects (of which there's been an open source reimplementation in the form of GNUstepWeb since the mid '90s) had a very similar model and was the first (or possibly second, depending on exactly how you count, but within a couple of months either way) ever web-app development framework. 20 years later, Rails is a new and exciting way of developing data-driven web applications that is completely different from anything that's come before!

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Re: Everyone hates Ruby by james_in_denver · 2014-11-26 07:51 · Score: 1

Redmine project management tool is an awesome ruby on rails app.
Re: Everyone hates Ruby by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 09:03 · Score: 1

I don't think I've ever heard of Zed talking about how great Ruby on Rails is.
http://harmful.cat-v.org/softw...
Re:Everyone hates Ruby by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 09:15 · Score: 2

Ruby is not used because it is "cool," and as somebody using Ruby for 10 years now, it is total hogwash. It is absolutely not encountered.
Ruby is chosen by managers because it is popular with programmers who use it and based on that you can hire a lot of talented people. There is significant competition for programmers, and using languages that are pleasant to program in is a real advantage.
And of course, it is chosen by programmers because it is pragmatic and modern OO without a bunch of ideological bullshit. And there is a really clean C interface, you can write your entire "Ruby" application in C if you want. And in fact, the majority of library code is in C.
The truth is, when you have a modern high-level language on top of a very simple, low level C API, that can access all language features, it can become difficult to find a job it is a demonstrably poor tool for. Even if I have a lot of stuff that I want to be in C, it is still nice to have the higher level application flow in a modern OO language.
Most things, Ruby gives 2 interfaces; high level modern, and thin wrapper over the old *nix C libs. Networking is done that way, for example. There are a wide variety of networking classes providing different levels of interface, all the way down to thin wrappers for C sockets.
Re:Everyone hates Ruby by Half-pint+HAL · 2014-11-26 09:30 · Score: 1

Two words: type safety.

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Re:Everyone hates Ruby by blackomegax · 2014-11-26 09:51 · Score: 1

Who needs code speed? We've got 4ghz haswells that'll brute any application to decent speed.
Re:Everyone hates Ruby by anchovy_chekov · 2014-11-26 10:16 · Score: 2

I'd agree here. As someone who started his career in Smalltalk, and then had to give it up for the lack of programming jobs available (10 years of my life becoming an expert in Delphi I'll never get back) Ruby wasn't so much "cool" as "beautiful". It felt like a coming home - an expressive, easy to read language where the answer to "how do I do X?" is "What's the most obvious way." A language predicated on programmer joy is a pretty sweet thing.

I think the Ruby world can be divided into two camps. There's the "we are nice, because Matz is nice" crowd that were dominant in the early days. When I was a newb I found the community very helpful, very welcoming. Then we got the "DHH is a prick, so we are pricks" bunch. I don't think they were ever in the majority, but they were loud and obnoxious and fit the mould of "hipsters". I don't think this is particular to Ruby though. Every community has its wankers, every community has its good citizens.

I still love Ruby for what it is, and am thankful I've been able to carve out a reasonably well-paying career based on it.
Re:Everyone hates Ruby by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 10:20 · Score: 1

Ruby has good type safety because while it is dynamically typed, it is also strongly typed. It is just a straw-man. People actually using Ruby know if type safety is an issue, or not. ;) (hint: not)
Re:Everyone hates Ruby by Kergan · 2014-11-26 10:26 · Score: 1

One more: immutable.
Re:Everyone hates Ruby by Half-pint+HAL · 2014-11-26 18:43 · Score: 1

Those words don't mean what you think they mean.
Ah yes. I see what you mean. Too long away from computing...

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Re:Everyone hates Ruby by Half-pint+HAL · 2014-11-27 03:02 · Score: 1

One more: immutable.
And to expand on that: backtracking -- you can't roll back once you've destroyed your data. Right now, I'm engineering something using backtracking in Python, and any accidental mutation is a bloody bugger to track down.

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Re: Everyone hates Ruby by Pseudonym · 2014-11-27 09:42 · Score: 1

I take it you haven't jumped ship to JIRA yet. Everyone else has.

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Re: Everyone hates Ruby by Pseudonym · 2014-11-27 09:43 · Score: 1

PHP programmers are considered "normal" these days? Only by comparison to the Ruby crowd.

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sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Re: Everyone hates Ruby by segedunum · 2014-11-27 10:53 · Score: 1

No normal person wants to deal with smug, "opinionated", Zed Shaw-inspired hipsters who swear all the time...
It's funny that those are exactly the people who Zed Shaw railed against.
Re: Everyone hates Ruby by devent · 2014-11-27 12:41 · Score: 1

Would should I switch from a open source project management software to a propritary software?
http://www.redmine.org/project... is fast as hell.
Compared to, for example Seping JIRA https://jira.spring.io/browse/... it's way faster and not confuluted.

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Re: Everyone hates Ruby by haploc · 2014-11-29 03:11 · Score: 1

Redmine is a nice Ruby app when you get it installed. But upgrading can be a pain when you are not a Ruby adept, and it requires the latest Ruby gems for its dependencies, which are not in your distro's main repositories.. It turned into dependency-hell.

Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by AltGrendel · 2014-11-26 04:15 · Score: 2

Just wondering what the new darling programing language is.

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Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by tigersha · 2014-11-26 04:29 · Score: 4, Interesting

I swear I did not think I would live to see the time where JavaScript was picked for performance...

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The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 05:46 · Score: 1

LOL, try again. We are talking about server-side JavaScript here!
Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by fourbadgers · 2014-11-26 07:00 · Score: 1

Go, for anything to do with 'The Cloud'. There seems to be a lot of people with backgrounds in ruby and python getting into Go. and node for a lot of the JS people getting into backend stuff.
Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by Tablizer · 2014-11-26 07:11 · Score: 1

JavaScript is widespread because of "QWERTY syndrome". It's available everywhere simply because it's available everywhere...unfortunately.
(It's fine for light-duty "gluing and scripting", but people are trying to do OS-like things with it.)

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Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by Tablizer · 2014-11-26 07:21 · Score: 1

C# - As a language, ignoring MS's platform-lockage API games, it seems to tick off the fewest. And one can use its brother, VB.Net, if they don't like the punctuation-heavy style and/or prefer type descriptors on the right of variable names.

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Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by TheRaven64 · 2014-11-26 07:30 · Score: 2

As with C before it, the fast languages are the ones where people have invested a lot of time and effort in the compilers. JavaScript is pretty horrible to compile, but there's no reason why languages like Java or Ruby would be slow, other than effort. The Ruby implementation is pretty slow, but it's also pretty simple. Go and C had the advantage of being able to get fairly good performance from a simple compiler, but if you compare a modern GCC or Clang to an early C compiler you'll see a massive performance improvement. A modern JavaScript implementation employs all of the techniques from Self and Smalltalk, as well as some new tricks (in particular, loading time is far more important for JavaScript in a web browser than any other language). If you look at the WebKit JavaScript implementation, it has four different implementations (a bytecode interpreter, a simple fast JIT, an optimising JIT and a more complex optimising JIT) and promotes code to the later ones as it appears on hot paths.

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Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by Tablizer · 2014-11-26 07:35 · Score: 1

Then name a language Cloud++ and it will fly off the shelves (even if it's a steaming mass of unicorn farts).

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Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by PmanAce · 2014-11-26 08:07 · Score: 1

Almost. AngularJS.

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Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by Tablizer · 2014-11-26 09:05 · Score: 1

It's what the next Duke Nukem will be written in.

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Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 09:38 · Score: 3, Informative

Yeah, Ruby remains slightly slow because we trade code clarity for speed. The speed and memory usage have both improved drastically over the years, to where now performance is quite good. Not leading, of course. Because only optimization and changes that retain simplicity are used. We don't care about runtime speed, though we increase it when we can do so without giving anything up. What matters more is that we can scale horizontally well, and maintain portability without a lot of repetition and platform-specific gobblygook.
Ruby has an awesome C API, where everything in "Ruby" is also available in C, and so something that needs tight loops and bare-metal whatever, we can do that, and still have a high level interface to whatever we did. We can do the hard parts in C, and still have the app logic that ties it together in Ruby. So you don't even hit a wall where "this software should be in a different language," or "this tool doesn't work for this job." Instead you get, "this class should be implemented in C."
So however fast the C compiler's code is, our code can be that fast if we need it to be. And the Ruby interpreter can remain optimized for readability and ease of bug-fixing. It is like having a whole toolbox and being allowed to use more than one tool for a job. A lot of languages, you choose a tool from the toolbox, and now you have build everything with it, with the only ways around that involving networked interfaces.
Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by phantomfive · 2014-11-26 10:54 · Score: 1

Just wondering what the new darling programing language is.
Python + Javascript, or just Javascript (via node.js or similar). Everyone is trying to make a Javascript framework. Everyone is trying to find the good parts of Javascript.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by phantomfive · 2014-11-26 10:57 · Score: 1

C# - As a language, ignoring MS's platform-lockage API games, it seems to tick off the fewest.
The biggest problem with C# (and the Microsoft ecosystem in general) is the lack of documentation. There are definitely some interesting ideas, like entity framework, but figuring out details when things aren't working is a real pain because of the poor documentation.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by phantomfive · 2014-11-26 11:41 · Score: 1

Yeap. It's amazing how much documentation they can have, and still make it difficult to find what you need.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by Desler · 2014-11-26 11:45 · Score: 1

I've done C# programming for 6 years and have never had any issues finding documentation and examples from MSDN. Do you have a specific example of what you have been unable to find documentation on?
Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by phantomfive · 2014-11-26 11:51 · Score: 2

Yeap, but I'll have to get back to you after thanksgiving. Stuff in the ado.net entity framework. I even bought the entity framework book.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 12:32 · Score: 1

PSA: Code clarity doesn't have anything to do with making a compiler that outputs slow binaries.
The more you know.
Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by perryizgr8 · 2014-11-26 15:21 · Score: 1

C# is probably the best documented language right now (apart from C/C++). Please pay a visit to MSDN.

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Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by phantomfive · 2014-11-26 17:08 · Score: 1

Java is without a doubt better. Not only is the documentation better, if there's a problem, I can actually look at the code.

Of course, C# has recently improved somewhat in that respect.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by segedunum · 2014-11-27 11:01 · Score: 1

LOL, try again. We are talking about server-side JavaScript here!
The worst possible use. JavaScript used for sever software is a perfect example of idiotic web programmers meddling in things they shouldn't be going anywhere near.
Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by Aighearach · 2014-11-27 23:03 · Score: 1

Complete nonsense, most of the libraries are in C, and writing C is a regular part of a Ruby programmer's job.
If all you do is Rails, and not Ruby generally, then of course you won't be touching C. If you're the person writing the libraries that the Rails people will use, then you're using C frequently, even if it is only to write Ruby bindings for things. It is really more often about interfacing than speed. C is the general purpose interface language.
Using the Ruby C API you can write individual methods in C, and others in Ruby. The fact that you can re-open classes at any time means that isn't even a discrete feature, it is just the natural way things work.
As to which parts might get rewritten... the parts that were bottlenecks according to the benchmarks or profiler, and nothing else.
Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment? by phantomfive · 2014-12-01 06:06 · Score: 1

Here's one example. The SetLink() method. It isn't clear what a link is, or really why you would want to add one. It's also not particularly clear where to find that kind of information (the book doesn't mention anything about links).

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."

As a senior RoR developer of 7 years by Dishwasha · 2014-11-26 04:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

I spend more of my time writing javascript/coffeescript than Ruby.

Re:As a senior RoR developer of 7 years by tigersha · 2014-11-26 04:30 · Score: 1

I would agree on that.

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The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Re: As a senior RoR developer of 7 years by Dishwasha · 2014-11-26 05:54 · Score: 1

I think you misunderstand my statement. I spend the most TIME writing in js/coffee (angular.js in particular). RoR is still the backend, but it's serving more as a thin API layer to backend data services. I also probably spend less time writing Ruby code because of better engineering which can be attributed to the language's elegance.

Re:THE FUCKING TAGLINE by Wootery · 2014-11-26 04:26 · Score: 1, Insightful

Tried Pipedot and SoylentNews?

Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby alive. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 04:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

For now at least, Chef seems to be the primary mover/shaker of Ruby-related stuff that I'm seeing anymore, otherwise I just don't encounter it at all.

Node? Check.
PHP? Forever.
Python? Sometimes.
PERL? Yes, I see this more than Ruby.

I'm just not seeing any new deployments of Ruby-based systems outside of Chef to manage those, and even there it's very minimal use of Ruby itself since most stuff is in templates and the like and not truly 'coding' in Ruby.

Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Narcocide · 2014-11-26 04:33 · Score: 4, Interesting

Clients care about hosting costs. Clients care about employment costs. Ruby is not enough slower than most other stuff to matter to a good coder, but most employers avoid actually hiring coders who are that good; they're too expensive and too hard to hold onto, and badly written Ruby is easily MUCH slower than badly written [anything else] for a number of circumstantial reasons. Hence, employers see Ruby as too expensive.

But a lot of this is definitely reinforced by hype.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 09:46 · Score: 1

The thing is, if you assume the exact same idiots actually get hired either way, their bad Ruby isn't any worse than their bad PHP would be. So that is not different enough to matter in the evaluation. Good try though, it was almost coherent.
Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by SQL+Error · 2014-11-26 12:29 · Score: 1

True. But bad Node.js code is faster than bad Ruby code. Will probably have even more bugs in it, though, because of the limitations present in both Javascript and Node.js.
Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 15:40 · Score: 1

True. But bad Node.js code is faster than bad Ruby code. Will probably have even more bugs in it, though, because of the limitations present in both Javascript and Node.js.
False. There is no limit to how bad or slow bad code can be. The bad code will suck, and will get refactored.
Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Narcocide · 2014-11-27 07:24 · Score: 1

Try benchmarking some regular expressions in PHP and compare it to Ruby and then see if you can still say that with a straight face.
Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Aighearach · 2014-11-27 23:11 · Score: 1

If you know about the history of regex in Ruby, that one stands out as a complaint from 2005 or so recycled as FUD.
I'll give you a hint: Ruby doesn't use its own regex library...
Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Narcocide · 2014-12-01 14:29 · Score: 1

I wasn't talking about ereg* functions. PHP also links to PCRE (preg* functions) ... seriously, you should try some comparative benchmarks.
Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Aighearach · 2014-12-01 17:09 · Score: 1

Thanks for playing, but it isn't slow, and you haven't shown it to be slow. Benchmarks linked by google show Ruby to have faster regex than python, so clearly, fast enough to be used in the wild. ;) Oh yeah, we already knew Ruby is indeed used in the wild.
Post your benchmark results already, lets see it. Show that Ruby is so awful that it makes it untrue that "if you assume the exact same idiots actually get hired either way, their bad Ruby isn't any worse than their bad PHP would be." It would have to be so bad to make Ruby not even usable, but we know that isn't true.
Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Narcocide · 2014-12-03 05:52 · Score: 1

Look, these benchmarks have been widely published and are easily re-creatable. Do it yourself, like I said, or since you're familiar with google, use that. Irrelevantly bringing up Python or just responding "no, u" isn't acceptable.
Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Aighearach · 2014-12-03 08:24 · Score: 1

Thanks for playing, but you're accusing Ruby of having some deficiency so big that it isn't usable. That is complete nonsense. I'm a professional Ruby programmer, the idea that I would do some benchmark and find out, "golly gee, this is so slow nobody can use it. Derrrr" I mean, seriously. Ruby has been in use for decades, get over yourself. There is no possible way for you to suddenly discover that it is so slow that clients are wishing for PHP. It is laughable, because the usefulness of Ruby is not theoretical. It is being used in the wild.
It is up to the accuser to provide the benchmarks that show whatever they are accusing. You won't find them, because Ruby doesn't have slow regex, and is actually quite good at the text-munging tasks that involve lots of regex.
Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients. by Narcocide · 2014-12-03 12:14 · Score: 1

But that's hardly what I'm accusing Ruby of whatsoever. I merely pointed out that its enough slower that its gained a bad reputation. I think you are the one who should get over yourself. You're obviously personally affronted by facts neither of us have direct control over, and unwilling to do the research yourself to prove your case.

php - ruby - node - ??? by slashdice · 2014-11-26 04:34 · Score: 2

It's called a fad.

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If it's losing steam it's because by MillerHighLife21 · 2014-11-26 04:36 · Score: 1, Insightful

It's because it's hard to find people. For whatever reason, despite the demand, people get violently offended that Ruby is the 99% solution instead of the 80% solution and stubbornly refuse to just learn it. Short of fringe, extreme performance tuning use case that somehow jruby didn't manage to solve...Ruby is just about the ultimate general purpose language. From sysadmin to web to DSL to backend to volume and utility of open source libraries to a community focussed on developer efficiency and happiness...ruby is "the language". There is no other language out that that addresses all of these so effectively.

Ruby is an excellent language that makes a lot of very complicated things in programming simpler to achieve thanks to run time manipulation of the core language. Specifically things like dependency injection and modifying existing libraries to suit your purpose without having to touch the code of the core library and break your upgrade path or extending the class and then replacing every single usage of it with your subclass. This accelerates problem solving, eases the use of smaller pieces of code and the ENTIRE language and gem ecosystem is what it is because it takes advantage of it.

The demand has been there for years and because the demand is so high, it means Ruby people are hard to find. For many companies that means that they'll end up using whatever they can find people to code with. You'll get people using all manner of PHP frameworks. The "hey, I know Javascript! Let's use Node!" crowd. The Java EVERYTHING crowd that for some inexplicable reason would use languages that isolate you to only running on the JVM like Groovy, Scala and Clojure instead of using jRuby for all of the same benefits with code that is portable OUTSIDE of the JVM. Then there's the .NET crowd who are in their own little world (but will embrace Node and Go because they work well in their world too).

In so many cases, what companies use is based on who they can find to hire because demand for programmers is so high right now that becomes a determining factor everywhere.

The only language out there that is legitimately picking up steam in the "I am different in a meaningful way" sense is Go. In the mean time, believe me, all this Ruby code isn't going anywhere. Regardless of whether you're talking Rails, Puppet, Chef, Capistrano, Foreman, RubyDNS, the Gem ecosystem and every other standard bearer for how to do things that are emulated across other languages these days...Ruby's everywhere.

When I learned that on the fly I could inject or replace a method in a core object at load time and in 3 lines of code solve a system wide problem no matter what design pattern, coding style, or good/bad architectural decision was made by a previous developer it pretty much changed my life as a programmer. There is virtually no programming problem in a ruby application that makes me grumble because I "have to deal with it" or it will "take years to fix" because it's so easy to fix. This applies with open source libraries or legacy applications. That's why Ruby is awesome and the biggest reason that I'll never understand the people that want to hate it so much.

--
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson

Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 05:02 · Score: 1

I think you substitute visual basic in there and he could be straight out of 1998.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by MillerHighLife21 · 2014-11-26 05:12 · Score: 1

Yes. Clearly. Visual Basic was a sysadmin language, a standard bearer that's copied in every other language, used to write DNS tools, ported to run on the JVM and use Java libraries, and the DSL language chosen as the basis for most of the infrastructure management tools used today for the cloud....
Exactly the same.

--
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Kielistic · 2014-11-26 05:37 · Score: 1

There is virtually no programming problem in a ruby application that makes me grumble because I "have to deal with it" or it will "take years to fix" because it's so easy to fix.
I'm going to have to assume that's because you've never seen Ruby used for anything more complicated than "display this html". Congrats on sounding like you work in a marketing department though. With your nice baseless assertions like:

When I learned that on the fly I could inject or replace a method in a core object at load time and in 3 lines of code solve a system wide problem no matter what design pattern, coding style, or good/bad architectural decision was made by a previous developer it pretty much changed my life as a programmer
I'm also not sure you should be allowed near anything more complicated that "display this html" with an attitude like that. The "bad architectural decisions made by previous developers" that people complain about are usually made by previous developers with that exact attitude.
Lack of organization and ad-hoc development rarely scales well.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Lunix+Nutcase · 2014-11-26 05:39 · Score: 1

and the DSL language chosen as the basis for most of the infrastructure management tools used today for the cloud....
In what alternate universe? There are 23 such tools listed on Wikipedia and only 3 are written in Ruby and/or use Ruby as one of the DSLs for configuration. 13% is hardly "most".
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by jbolden · 2014-11-26 05:54 · Score: 2

Basically the above is: http://www.randomhacks.net/200...
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by OverlordQ · 2014-11-26 06:23 · Score: 1

Specifically things like dependency injection and modifying existing libraries to suit your purpose without having to touch the code of the core library [...] When I learned that on the fly I could inject or replace a method in a core object at load time
That sounds like an utter nightmare. 2 + 2 = 4, except when we patched + to mean something else.

--
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Wdomburg · 2014-11-26 06:42 · Score: 1

Java is grand. Using jRuby to prototype, explore and extend is even better.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Half-pint+HAL · 2014-11-26 06:44 · Score: 2

even without Rails, Ruby itself is just about the ultimate utility language. There's legitimately no reason to avoid learning short of "I hate Ruby for no apparent reason".
Really? No legitimate reason at all? Not even "I code embedded systems" or "I'm a carpenter"? Or less fascetiously, because typechecking makes debugging easier, so some people don't want to use a dynamically typed language.

--
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Wdomburg · 2014-11-26 07:02 · Score: 1

1) anyObject.class
2) Um, no. Objects cannot magically change their class, period. You might assign a different object to a given variable, but the language is strongly typed.
3) Huh? There are relatively few symbols in Ruby, as a rule. Are you referring to special variables (like $: $0 etc?)? Those are ancillary and not considered idiomatic these days. Don't like them? Don't use them.
4) Why shouldn't they? The first is a just a chained method. No different than "foo.split(' ').length;" in Java. I'm assuming the latter is supposed to be "num.to_s 16", which would be "Integer.toString(num,16)" in Java, but that is just because the Java designers weren't nice enough to allow you to pass a radix argument to the non-static method. There is nothing in the language that would have precluded "num.toString(16);" being valid.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Tablizer · 2014-11-26 07:03 · Score: 1

Ruby will probably fail to go mainstream for the same reason Lisp has. It's wonderfully flexible in that it's almost a meta language that allows you to shape your "language" into just about any construct you want.
The downside is that everybody thinks different, and shaping a language to fit your head de-fits it for other heads. Standards are often preferred because they provide consistency between individuals and teams even when they don't perfectly fit a specific situation in terms of parsimony and compactness of expression.
The lesson of the market is that inter- and and intra-team communication trumps parsimony economically, in most cases.

--
Table-ized A.I.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Wdomburg · 2014-11-26 07:15 · Score: 2

The real win for me is JRuby. The Java ecosystem is at least as broad as perl, and generally better suited to enterprise applications. There are generally perl modules for everything, but they often perform far worse (e.g. Net::LDAP is probably an order of magnitude slower than UnboundID processing LDIF) or are just terrible code (e.g. Net::Sieve::Script which is a regex-based hack, rather than an actual language parser like jSieve).
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 09:48 · Score: 1

Shut the fuck up, Ruby shill.
What an excellent, well-thought-out rebuttal! I'm sure everybody will flock to adopt your analysis.
I could replace you with a Ruby bot in under 10 lines of code, and nobody would notice the difference.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 09:55 · Score: 2

Embedded systems have mRuby, which is super-hot in robotics right now. It is a set of C libraries, you can pick and choose which parts of the language you want to build in, and it runs almost anywhere with 32bit registers and x (some small amount) RAM.
Ruby has real advantages in the way it combines Smalltalk object semantics with C/Perl style syntax. It is important to learn, even if you're not going to use it, because it is one of the big ideas in the industry over the past few decades. I got interested in Ruby in the late 90s when Larry Wall said, "if you want to write everything using OOP than Ruby is a better language than Perl." I did wait for English manuals, though.
And yes, a carpenter who is writing software should really consider Ruby because it is easy to learn and you can go a long ways with "baby Ruby" without having to learn a bunch of extra crap. The Principle of Least Surprise and related concepts are a great benefit to the casual user.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 10:01 · Score: 1

Kernel hackers should have at least a few hours toying with all of the modern languages so that they understand how the OS is used by the applications that do whatever tasks the computers are there to do. Kernels aren't useful without applications. Haters gotta hate, but hate is no reason not to learn the basics of the industry you work in. Especially if you fancy yourself as having an important role of some sort.
Not all mathematicians will need to use all the techniques that are taught. But they still are expected to have learned them at some point, even if their job ends up not using some type of method.
You can't know what tool you need when you come across the situation the tool is for, unless you learn as least the basics of all the tools that are used in your area of work. If you've never used a screwdriver because you decided, without having used it, that hammers are better, then you'll still be using the hammer. How are you going to avoid "every problem looks like a nail" without learning more tools that you don't already know you have a use for?
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Lunix+Nutcase · 2014-11-26 11:26 · Score: 1

Embedded systems have mRuby, which is super-hot in robotics right now.
[citation needed] I know tons of embedded programmers and not a single one uses Ruby in their work.

It is a set of C libraries, you can pick and choose which parts of the language you want to build in, and it runs almost anywhere with 32bit registers and x (some small amount) RAM.
So basically excluding a large part of the embedded market that runs on 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers with KB of RAM and ROM.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Desler · 2014-11-26 11:50 · Score: 1

There are plenty of better languages to learn over Ruby if people need to learn the "basics of the industry". Ruby is only marginally more popular than moribund languages like Delphi.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by perryizgr8 · 2014-11-26 15:27 · Score: 1

The only language I have ever seen used in true embedded stuff is C. At max C++. Anything else is fringe, or not really embedded.

--
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by perryizgr8 · 2014-11-26 15:31 · Score: 1

Effective Java development is near impossible without an IDE managing background compilation for you. Code is fast as hell though.
Is this some sort of a joke? Java has everything going for it except the execution speed. Show me one program written in Java that runs at acceptable speed on average hardware. Hell, Visual Studio compiled C# runs faster on a Raspberry Pi than Java.

--
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 16:14 · Score: 1

There are plenty of better languages to learn over Ruby if people need to learn the "basics of the industry". Ruby is only marginally more popular than moribund languages like Delphi.
That's pretty derpy. Haters hate, but you might want to check your data source on that one. I doubt it is based on programmer demand.
But lets see, there is a linked article! Maybe it says something relevant. Oh, it talks about programmer pay, a realistic gauge of demand. Turns out RubyOnRails is at the top of the list.
You really, seriously are going to come out and claim that Pascal is almost as popular as Ruby? In 2014? That wasn't even true 10 years ago, but it was closer.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 16:26 · Score: 1

strictly speaking, mRuby is just a framework for C. It is basically impossible to use unless you're already using C as your main language. You don't need to run the interpreter to use it, or to evaluate any Ruby code, you can use it entirely for the type system for example. It is like Lua. It is really useful to have in the bag for prototyping, and the end result is still C.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 16:28 · Score: 1

Right, the very smallest stuff it is not realistic to add a lot of high level features to the language running on the hardware, you'd want the high level stuff to be code generators running on the development workstation. But where you have more complicated processing needs, for example inside factory robots, then mRuby is getting a lot of use. It was funded by Japanese heavy industry.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Lunix+Nutcase · 2014-11-26 17:32 · Score: 1

Again [citation needed]. You claim doesn't match any of the embedded industry news I follow or any of the work any embedded software developer does. You're likely overexaggerating a miniscule niche market as the person above said.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Lunix+Nutcase · 2014-11-26 17:33 · Score: 1

"Does that I know" that should be. To add, I also have a number of books on embedded programming (a number of them pretty recent) and all zero of them mention Ruby.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Desler · 2014-11-26 17:52 · Score: 1

Exactly. This guy lives in some sort of bizarro world Rubyist bubble. Sure, there is probably some guy's toy project to use Ruby in some sort of faux embedded environment, but that hardly matches what is done by the actual people writing the software.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by segedunum · 2014-11-27 11:12 · Score: 1

I think that's possibly the best advertisement for Ruby here, along with all the other derogatory comments about Ruby posted by some guy called 'Anonymous Coward'. He's really busy.
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by devent · 2014-11-27 13:40 · Score: 1

I run a lot of apps that are in Java and they run with the same speed as any other app.
Eclipse, VisualParadigm, FreeMind, FreeCol, yEd, jedit, and my own written apps.

--
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Re:If it's losing steam it's because by Aighearach · 2014-11-27 23:07 · Score: 1

You have heard of heavy manufacturing? It is a thing. It is not my thing. It is also not a toy.
It is who funded and participated in development. So if you think the Japanese heavy manufacturing industry is a bubble, yes, that is bizarro world indeed. :P
Re:If it's losing steam it's because by sponse · 2014-11-27 23:46 · Score: 1

Java is slow on desktops but has really good performance on servers.
On servers you got plenty of ram and people to tune up the application after the installation. Once you start the application and after the warm up time Java is fast.

Python by Art3x · 2014-11-26 04:41 · Score: 1

David Heinemeier Hansson was sick of PHP, found Ruby, and invented Rails in 2004. No mention is made of him toying with Python. I think that if he had found Python that he would have liked it just as much. Django had not come out though.

I guess that he did the best he could with what he had, but I wonder if he would he would have just switched from PHP to Django had he started five years later.

Re:Python by tomhath · 2014-11-26 05:00 · Score: 1

Every few years someone realizes they can query the database schema and generate CRUD forms. I never understood why Rails became popular, it was the same old approach with the same old inherent shortcomings - mostly that management thinks you have 80% of the application written in a couple of hours, when in fact you have almost nothing with any business value that a database IDE like PhpMyAdmin doesn't give you.
Re:Python by rasmusbr · 2014-11-26 05:48 · Score: 1

Nah, real programmers just wire analog components together until they get the behavior that they need.
Re:Python by jbolden · 2014-11-26 05:57 · Score: 1

J2EE became popular because it answered the question in a reasonable way of how to handle state for web application development. Rails became popular because it offered a way to do 80% of what J2EE allowed at 20% of the development time and complexity.
Re:Python by VGPowerlord · 2014-11-26 08:04 · Score: 2

Of course, Java hasn't stood still, nor have the people that write libraries for it.
Hell, I want to say the Java + Spring + Hibernate stack even existed before RoR did.
Thanks to advances over the years, you can now write Spring applications using no XML. Short example (the longer example guide seems to have gone MIA on the Spring Guides site).
Although I'd hope you'd be using your web server/servlet container's database setup stuff (including connection pooling) rather than hard-coding it into the app.

--
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Re:Python by tigersha · 2014-11-26 08:39 · Score: 1

No, Java was very heavily influenced by RoR. Before DHH said "Screw Java" J2EE was a seriously bad, complex mess. After lots of people went to RoR because it is such a PITA to write J2Ee (I was one) a lot of simplyfying went into J2EE which improved it.

--
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism

Rails never had 'steam'. by Qbertino · 2014-11-26 04:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

Rails never had 'steam'. (I supose you mean something else than that digi-distro-channel by Valve)

Rails was and is a fad - plain and simple.

Every haphazard PHP project runs circles around it - for the simple fact that deploying PHP is dead simple, whereas with Rails it's a major PITA. Rails was discovered and hijacked/promoted by the Java community - and while they were all happy and gleeful about the lightweight convention-over-configuration approach they didn't know until then - the Rails & Ruby community bloated Rails beyond repair big-time-Java-style with libs, extensions, mandatory deployment systems that only a very small minority really needs, etc. Rails ran into walls in the real world and the abysmal arrogance of its community scared n00bs away.

The truth is, nobody needs rails. PHP and its big frameworks are faster and easyer to develop for, both PHPs and Pythons communities are way more n00by friendly and for people who need something big, easy and scalable there's projects like Plone (Python) or Typo3 Neos (PHP) for massive non-trivial installments, each with hundreds of active developers to back them.

The only thing that Rails had going for it was a website that didn't look like shit - back in a time when most FOSS websites mostly *did* look like shit - and the brand-new concept of screencasts to show of scaffolding and code-generation. That has changed thankfully, throughout the FOSS community. Scaffolding - definitely not a first with Rails - is now well know as a concept and commonplace. And the FOSS projects are finally aware that marketing, including websites that don't suck, is important. That's the overall improvement that Rails brought along.

But right now Rails as a FW is way to bloated, unwieldy and buggy to be of any use for a web-project beyond enthusiasts fiddling with it. I have yet to get a Rails environment running on my laptop for local development. With PHP its download MAMP, XAMPP or "apt-get install mod-php" and start progging.

So, yeah, no steam, only hot air.
And, yes, from what I can tell, the hypes been over since about 2 years.

My 2 cents.

--
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca

Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by xaxa · 2014-11-26 05:19 · Score: 1

Rails never had 'steam'. (I supose you mean something else than that digi-distro-channel by Valve)
A steam locomotive. When it runs out of steam, it stops. (Wording chosen for the pun with Rails.)
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by The+Raven · 2014-11-26 07:09 · Score: 2

I agree that Rails is a fad. But touting PHP as better is... odd. PHP is a dismal language, with horrible coding practices and duplicate commands (some are bad, some are good, who knows which is which). Using a library, you have no idea what code they used... did they use the old string routine that's vulnerable to buffer overflows, or the new one? Why does PHP even KEEP the broken commands, it's insane!
Ruby is good (despite performance issues), PHP is bad. I'll take any framework built around Ruby over any framework built around PHP.

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"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by maxwells+daemon · 2014-11-26 07:50 · Score: 1

But right now Rails as a FW is way to bloated --> But right now Rails as a FW is way _too_ bloated
my german is Hogan's Heroes based. "to" might be a simple typo, but just in case. "too", in this case, is to an excessive degree. As opposed to: me, too, I think RoR is excessively bloated. Like a fish too long on the shore (simile). In the sun.
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 10:11 · Score: 1

Rails has been out for 10 years. You keep using this word "fad" but I'm not sure it means what you think it means.
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by HarrySquatter · 2014-11-26 11:39 · Score: 1

Disco and bell-bottoms were both around for more than 10 years. They are all still a widely-used examples of fads. Methinks you don't understand what fad means.
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 11:54 · Score: 1

PHP is bad in the same sense that Visual Basic was bad. They both are tools that allow you to put something out there at insane speeds. Technically speaking they might not be all that structured but you cannot deny the value they have for RAD.
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 16:21 · Score: 1

fad
noun
1.
a temporary fashion, notion, manner of conduct, etc., especially one followed enthusiastically by a group.
Origin
1825-1835
1825-35; noun use of dial. fad to look after things, busy oneself with trifles, back formation from obsolete faddle to play with, fondle. See fiddle
or

fad /fæd/
noun (informal)
1.
an intense but short-lived fashion; craze
2.
a personal idiosyncrasy or whim
I'm honestly very surprised to find multiple people in the same thread who not only don't know the word "fad," but apparently can't even operate a dictionary. If it is not temporary, it is not a fad. Disco was a fad because it was temporarily very popular, and then went back to not being very popular, except as a funny thing from the past. Rails, OTOH, was quickly popular, and has remained steadily popular for reasons having nothing to do with a fashion, craze, or following. Rather, it is seen as a quality tool for building dynamic websites rapidly and with polished results.
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by HarrySquatter · 2014-11-26 17:28 · Score: 1

Disco was "temporarily popular" in the mainstream from 73 to 79. So again methinks you don't understand what fad means.
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 17:50 · Score: 1

Disco was "temporarily popular" in the mainstream from 73 to 79. So again methinks you don't understand what fad means.
That doesn't even contradict me! lolololololol
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by ahabswhale · 2014-11-26 18:14 · Score: 1

If you can't get Rails up and running, I weep for you. I'm hardly a fanboy (and have never used it to build a real app) but it's pretty braindead simple.

--
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Re:Rails never had 'steam'. by Qbertino · 2014-11-27 06:45 · Score: 1

I agree that Rails is a fad. But touting PHP as better is... odd.
Never said PHP was good.
But PHP *is* better - in more ways than one. If anything, PHPs badness is its advantage.
Rails and the Ruby team try to do everthing right - that's why they get stuck in layer and layers of package management, mandatory deployment automation, to many options, crummy documentation and constant breakage, dependancy hell, etc.
It takes minutes to get to real work on the app layer in PHP, days in Rails/Ruby. I can download the newest Zip of Wordpress and have a site running in 30 minutes. Yes, WPs architecture is bizar and beyond sanity, its ERD is a crime against humanity, but it works! Same with Joomla, Drupal and the lot. ... Not seeing anything of that magnitude coming out of the Rails community, not in the past, not in the future.
Yet the PHP people had Frameworks up and running in no time. CakePHP is an official Rails clone in PHP - and by now way more stable and consistent. Symfony, Zend and Flow are all three Frameworks that tout the newest and bravest of programming paradigms and just as easy to deploy and set up as any old PHP WebCMS. Meantime Rails is still navel-gazing. I doubt it will maintain its critical mass. If anything JavaScript all-over (Client- and Serverside) is coming with Node.js. If anything, that will touple the PHP reign - allthough I'm not holding my breath on that one - for one, Node.js is callback hell for large non-trivial applications.

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We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca

Some history on Rails and Django by Qbertino · 2014-11-26 05:07 · Score: 2

David Heinemeier Hansson was sick of PHP, found Ruby, and invented Rails in 2004. No mention is made of him toying with Python. I think that if he had found Python that he would have liked it just as much. Django had not come out though.

I guess that he did the best he could with what he had, but I wonder if he would he would have just switched from PHP to Django had he started five years later.

The Rails crew knows the Django crew and vice-versa from the very beginning. They're basically drinking-buddies.
Rails simply was the favourite scripting language inside 37 Signals (DHHs favourite PL to be percise), so they developed their internal Basecamp Tool with it.
And built Rails as a foundation for that.

Basecamp became so popular with 37 Signals customers, they decided to turn it into a service.

--
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca

Re:Some history on Rails and Django by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 10:10 · Score: 2

No, what he's saying is that Rails wasn't written to be a framework for others to use, it was written to solve the real problems that the consultancy that created had to solve for their clients. And it was such a huge success, they gave it away to the world to promote their consultancy business. Which was also successful.
That it has always been solving real problems first, and isn't born from ideology, might explain pretty much everything about its success.

Django won the web, Node trying to win apps by mozumder · 2014-11-26 05:07 · Score: 1, Insightful

It's ORM is much better than anything in Node, which is why so many content/e-commerce sites are using it.

Node is only good for apps, which is a much smaller market than content & e-commerce sites. But Node really doesn't have a chance against native apps, especially when its competing against something like Swift on iOS.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali by Bigbutt · 2014-11-26 05:15 · Score: 1

Yea, we're evaluating config management tools and have excluded puppet and chef specifically because it requires a ruby instance.

[John]

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Shit better not happen!

Yo, its 2014! by Zecheus · 2014-11-26 05:18 · Score: 1

The internet boom, THE dot-com boom 'n' crash, 9/11 (2001!) and birth of DHS all predated (2014 - 10). Math (or history) is hard. Ruby On Rails originated in 2003. The crash of the global economy followed.

Re:Yo, its 2014! by Zecheus · 2014-11-26 05:20 · Score: 1

RoR in 2005. See what you did to me!
Re:Yo, its 2014! by jfbilodeau · 2014-11-26 05:26 · Score: 2

Ruby On Rails originated in 2003. The crash of the global economy followed.
So...RoR crashed the economy then?

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Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
Re:Yo, its 2014! by Niris · 2014-11-26 05:30 · Score: 1

Original poster said "inside a span of 10 years", not "in the last 10 years." Reading comprehension is hard.
Re:Yo, its 2014! by Half-pint+HAL · 2014-11-26 06:18 · Score: 3, Funny

Ruby On Rails originated in 2003. The crash of the global economy followed.
So...RoR crashed the economy then?
I told you guys that dynamic typing was unstable....

--
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Re:Yo, its 2014! by fibonacci8 · 2014-11-26 07:14 · Score: 1

So it's also "inside a span of 100 billion years", and a vague statement at best.

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Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Re:Yo, its 2014! by Zecheus · 2014-11-26 08:13 · Score: 1

There is only one 10 year span with relevance to the context of this post: the 10 year span that ends now. Historians would care what the highest paid programming job is in 1978, or 2011. People planning a programming career, or evaluating opportunities TODAY won't care. Reading comprehension is hard, but contextual analysis is harder.
Re:Yo, its 2014! by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 08:57 · Score: 1

I started using it in `04, so I doubt that.
Re:Yo, its 2014! by toddestan · 2014-11-27 06:03 · Score: 1

December 2005 was the 1.0 release. It was around in 2004, but at that time it was still pretty obscure.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali by Electrawn · 2014-11-26 05:40 · Score: 1

Wow. The core of Chef is Erlang which allows modules to load in ruby,perl, python or whatever you want. The client is in ruby.

Excluding the top tools on the market because of zealotry against the language? Wow.

Re:The tagline displays for me just fine by wonkey_monkey · 2014-11-26 05:56 · Score: 1

How, exactly, would the appearance of six words on screen improve your Slashdot experience?

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systemd is Roko's Basilisk.

Whats the alternative then? by MrBandersnatch · 2014-11-26 05:59 · Score: 1

I still would find myself hard pressed to select a language and framework that would get a vanilla CRUD based site or backend up and running as quickly as one can with RoR.

Python/Django is heading there but I find Python to be less productive as a language and I've shot myself in the foot a few times due to whitespace issues (especially when refactoring). MS languages are a no-no until they bite the bullet and officially support *nix based system; Java ... shoot me; Scala .. shoot me twice! (and then once more for mercy), Go just doesn't have the productivity benefits, although I'd stand being convinced there; nodejs ... good in the early stages but I find that maintainability suffers as applications scale; PHP/Laravel ... well again, maybe, I've not really looked.

I actually do not like Rails I should also mention - rather than refine the framework it has become a bloated mixed bag of goodies much like the paradigms it replaced, so I would be genuinely interested in opinions on the alternatives.

Re:Whats the alternative then? by Tablizer · 2014-11-26 07:16 · Score: 1

If you master its "different" framework, perhaps you are right. But the problem is that the learning curve is too high. A master swordsman can probably beat a generic cop with a gun in a urban environment. However, it takes a heck of a lot of training to reach that point. Cops with guns are cheaper and easier to find and train.

--
Table-ized A.I.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali by Bigbutt · 2014-11-26 06:36 · Score: 1

Not zealotry. I'm not a fan of having to install extra software such as Ruby or other agents on every server. If I can't manage every server with the tool, then I continue using what I do now or look for a tool that doesn't need an agent. Heck, security requirements make installing extra software a bear due to dependencies. I have to manually install and chase down the additional packages. We have quite a few older systems which don't support these agents, even cfengine. So having an agentless tool to do configuration management is the goal. I am considering Ansible but if it doesn't work, I'll continue to use my ssh based scripts.

[John]

--
Shit better not happen!

"Steam" is only half the salary equation by hey! · 2014-11-26 07:31 · Score: 4, Insightful

Specifically: the demand curve half of the equation. The other half is the supply curve. A platform can have *no steam whatsoever*, but so few programmers that the salaries are reasonably high.

Consider Delphi programming. I see Delphi positions come up once in a blue moon -- it's not used much any longer. But those salaries run from $80K to $110K plus. Sometimes you see a Delphi position come up in the mid 40s, but I suspect they're government positions.

I've seen listings for COBOL or PoweBuilder programmers both in the $60K to $110K plus range. You can bet when a company offers $110K for a PowerBuilder programmer it's because it's having a hard time finding one.

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Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.

Re:"Steam" is only half the salary equation by phantomfive · 2014-11-26 10:59 · Score: 1

I see Delphi positions come up once in a blue moon -- it's not used much any longer. But those salaries run from $80K to $110K plus.

$110K doesn't seem like a good salary for a programmer to me, but in some regions maybe it is.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:"Steam" is only half the salary equation by phantomfive · 2014-11-26 12:43 · Score: 1

In what hugely expensive elite enclave in the world is 110kUSD not a good salary for making computer code?
Silicon Valley

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."

Re:What killed Ruby by Wdomburg · 2014-11-26 07:47 · Score: 1

It may not be the most popular option, but Ruby is hardly a marginal language. RedMonk has it tied for 6th with C++, PYPL has it at 10th, and TIOBE has it at 14th. It came off from the Rails high, but it remains steadily popular.

The ecosystem has actually got significantly better over the years, especially as Puppet, Chef, MCollective and others have driven popularity as an admin language, rather than a web language. But more importantly, JRuby pulls in the entire Java ecosystem, which actually puts it in a better position than perl or python, in my opinion. There is Jython, but that lags significantly behind C Python (current stable is 2.5 compatible, which was released eight years ago; their 2.7 release has been in beta for about 21 months) while JRuby offers Ruby 2.1 compatibility in their current stable release and will be putting out their release candidate for 2.2 around the same time as the Ruby 2.2 stable release.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali by bmimatt · 2014-11-26 08:29 · Score: 1

Well, you do not "have to install extra software on every server", you can have Chef or Puppet or even Ansible do that for you. While you're sipping your coffee and watch it run :)

Re:What killed Ruby by MillerHighLife21 · 2014-11-26 08:32 · Score: 2

jRuby totally changes the dynamic for Ruby, no question. It solves virtually every non-imaginary production problem that Ruby's historically had WHILE adding the entire Java ecosystem to the mix.

Python is very heavily tied to C. Ruby seems to live in both worlds much more successfully.

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"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson

Re:What killed Ruby by H0p313ss · 2014-11-26 09:08 · Score: 1

RedMonk has it tied for 6th with C++, PYPL has it at 10th, and TIOBE has it at 14th. It came off from the Rails high, but it remains steadily popular.

That would be a usage of the word popular with which I was previously unfamiliar.

That makes it sound as popular as poking your eyes out with a tree branch.

--
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction

Perl 6 by Sez+Zero · 2014-11-26 09:28 · Score: 1

Will be released in 2015... just sayin'.

Re:THE FUCKING TAGLINE by tehlinux · 2014-11-26 09:42 · Score: 1

>for now

I don't see reddit improving in quality any time soon (not that that invalidates your comment)

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Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali by Aighearach · 2014-11-26 09:44 · Score: 1

Yeah, but using tools to that level requires reading manuals, and finding out what the features are before you decide if you hate it or not. It is so much simpler to just learn one way of doing things, and then muddle through with it forever, and install crap on servers by hand. Sure, it takes more work and doesn't scale, but it doesn't require more than one learning cycle per 3 decades. So there will always be a contingent that promote this way, and try to find ways of making themselves sound like Very Serious People.

I guess you could say... by zeroryoko1974 · 2014-11-26 10:18 · Score: 2

*puts on sunglasses* It's gone off the rails

Re:githut by njahnke · 2014-11-26 10:24 · Score: 1

... or pizza the hutt?

Re:githut by Noah+Haders · 2014-11-26 11:12 · Score: 1

the Schwartz is with you!

not short lived enought fad by sdinfoserv · 2014-11-26 11:13 · Score: 1

The true index of programming languages, Tiobe, ranks Ruby at 14 and going down. If you're a ruby dev and making that kind of coin... bravo, stash it as your days are numbered. If you're looking for a new language to learn, look else where. I've been a php dev and found attempting to use Ruby an unpractical PITA. It just sucked.

Re:Looks fabricated by Desler · 2014-11-26 11:47 · Score: 1

Ruby needs all the help it can get. 19 years later and it's only marginally more popular than Delphi. And that language has been moribund for around a decade.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali by ArsonSmith · 2014-11-26 13:46 · Score: 1

The chef server is in Erlang, of course the chef server doesn't do very much but auth hosts and server files. the client does pretty much everything.

--
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali by ArsonSmith · 2014-11-26 13:50 · Score: 1

It actually packages it's own embedded ruby instance, and if you excluding ruby and by extension Vagrant you really are missing out.

--
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.

Everyone hates everything by Anonymous Coward · 2014-11-26 13:50 · Score: 1

What you just described is true for any developer who calls him/herself a "${LANGUAGE}ist", or chains their identity to a language or framework. "PHP developers" are nightmarish. I've met "Java specialists" who produce absolutely incomprehensible shit, shit that's in some cases substantially worse than even average "Ruby developers". Successful developers evaluate and select tools to fit the problem they're trying to solve.

Re:What killed Ruby by Wdomburg · 2014-11-29 10:06 · Score: 1

Considering the proliferation of programming languages out there, holding a spot in the top ten is respectable. Certainly not tantamount to self-mutilation.

Re:What killed Ruby by Wdomburg · 2014-11-29 10:09 · Score: 1

No one?

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