Is Ruby Still a 'Serious' Programming Language? (wired.com)
- Reference: 0180317845
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/12/07/0248219/is-ruby-still-a-serious-programming-language
- Source link: https://www.wired.com/story/ruby-is-not-a-serious-programming-language/
Han believes that the world of programming has "moved on", and "everything Ruby does, another language now does better, leaving it without a distinct niche.
> Ruby is easy on the eyes. Its syntax is simple, free of semicolons or brackets. More so even thanPython — a language known for its readability — Ruby reads almost like plain English... Ruby, you might've guessed, is dynamically typed. Python and JavaScript are too, but over the years, those communities have developed sophisticated tools to make them behave more responsibly. None of Ruby's current solutions are on par with those. It's far too conducive to what programmers call "footguns," features that make it all too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
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> Critically, Ruby's performance profile consistently ranks near the bottom (read: slowest) among major languages. You may remember Twitter's infamous "fail whale," the error screen with a whale lifted by birds that appeared whenever the service went down. You could say that Ruby was largely to blame. Twitter's collapse during the 2010 World Cup served as a wake-up call, and the company resolved to migrate its backend to Scala, a more robust language.
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> The move paid off: By the 2014 World Cup, Twitter handled a record 32 million tweets during the final match without an outage. Its new Scala-based backend could process up to 100 times faster than Ruby. In the 2010s, a wave of companies replaced much of their Ruby infrastructure, and when legacy Ruby code remained, new services were written in higher-performance languages.
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> You may wonderwhy people are still using Ruby in 2025. It survives because of its parasitic relationship with Ruby on Rails, the web framework that enabled Ruby's widespread adoption and continues to anchor its relevance.... Rails was the framework of choice for a new generation of startups. The main code bases of Airbnb, GitHub, Twitter, Shopify, and Stripe were built on it.
He points out on Stack Overflow's annual developer survey, Ruby has slipped from a top-10 technology in 2013 to #18 this year — "behind evenAssembly" — calling Ruby "a kind of professional comfort object, sustained by the inertia of legacy code bases and the loyalty of those who first imprinted upon it." But the article [2]drew some criticism on X.com . ("You should do your next piece about how Vim isn't a serious editor and continue building your career around nerd sniping developers.")
Other reactions...
"Maybe WIRED is just not a serious medium..."
"FWIW — Ruby powered Shopify through another Black Friday / Cyber Monday — breaking last year's record."
"Maybe you should have taken a look at TypeScript..."
Wired's subheading argues that Ruby "survives on affection, not utility. Let's move on." Are they right? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.
Is Ruby still a 'serious' programming language?
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/ruby-is-not-a-serious-programming-language/
[2] https://x.com/sheonhan/status/1995557568866123796
what is meant by serious? (Score:3)
Is Cobol "still a 'serious' programming language?" Is Fortran "still a 'serious' programming language?"
Is EditorDavid still a serious editor? Was he ever?
Re: (Score:2)
Is Slashdot a serious site? I'm surprised it continues to exist at all. There's what, about 100 of us still, I imagine most are blocking the ads too.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair TFS postulates a situation where the language has better alternatives for literally every scenario. I'd argue that Cobol and Fortran have carved out a niche where they *are* the best in their class. Comparing the three sort of shows you missed that point of that second sentence.
Ruby? (Score:1)
Haven't the wheels fallen off
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, but aren't trains with 2mm wheels dope?
Correction (Score:3)
Javascript is not dynamically typed... it is allegedly typed, when it feels like it.
Is Sheon Han still a 'serious' programmer? (Score:2)
If he ever was one?
"Ruby reads almost like plain English"??? (Score:2)
What kind of crack are you smoking when you're reading plain English, also Plain English has semi-colons.
Of course! (Score:2)
Of course Ruby is still a serious programming language! So many people on my GitHub fork my code to tell me to RIIR (Rewrite it in Ruby)...
Fuck your Feelings. (Score:2)
> Is Ruby still a 'serious' programming language?
As opposed to what? A ‘funny’ language?
Is Ruby still an optimum language or valid choice, is the correct way to frame that question.
The fucking compiler is only worried about how ‘serious’ you are when you feed it a joke of a coding session after assuming those two bong hits would give your mind Redbull “wings” at 2AM.
Stop with the emotional association already. Coddling shit like this will get you sued by AI for ‘emotional distress’ when you ask the wrong
Writer's Tricks (Score:2)
"Ruby, you mightâ(TM)ve guessed, is dynamically typed. Python and JavaScript are too, but over the years, those communities have developed sophisticated tools to make them behave more responsibly." Make? Them (..who)? Behave? Responsibly? The heck is this guy saying there, with neither example nor description? Attacking his target audience savagely while excusing his (larger) favored readership without explanation, in vague language... Classic flamebait. I think this author knows what his goal is,
Scala? (Score:2)
FTA:
"and the company resolved to migrate its backend to Scala, a more robust language."
If they were serious about performance they'd have skipped all languages except those that run bare metal. Modern C++ is a seriously powerful and fast - albeit perhaps too complicated - language without all the gotchas of older C++ and plain C.
Re: (Score:2)
> If they were serious about performance they'd have skipped all languages except those that run bare metal. Modern C++ is a seriously powerful and fast - albeit perhaps too complicated - language without all the gotchas of older C++ and plain C.
Ultimately it's a compromise between performance and how deep to go with optimization. Being "serious" about performance doesn't mean forfeiting the compromise and going for bare metal all the time.
Scala runs on the JVM and a modern JVM with JIT compilation can achieve very respectable performance. Depending on their use-case it might be enough to favor it over a C/C++ implementation and all the complexities it brings.
Troll article (Score:2)
Nothing to see here, move on. And I'm not even a Ruby fan.
Serious? (Score:2)
Was Ruby ever a "serious" programming language? I mean, nothing I ever want to program can even be programmed in Ruby. And even if that were possible it would be so slow as to be useless.
Wrong premise (Score:2)
It's not the language that is 'serious' or not; it's the programmer.
Wat (Score:2)
[1]https://www.destroyallsoftware... [destroyallsoftware.com]
[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat