Introducing Rubinius X

http://rubini.us/2013/10/15/introducing-rubinius-x/

by yannski • 13 years ago

153 211 13 years ago

yannski3• 13 years ago

The post contains lots of contradictory facts.

First, some people (not all) are using other tools than Ruby. They are looking for a solution to their problems. IMHO Ruby is not even present in the discussion when people make their choices. But Rails is. So I'm not sure that modernizing Ruby is sufficient. Building a modern framework around it could be though. I mean, people go to NodeJS because of Node, not because of Javascript...

the_watcher4• 13 years ago

>But Rails is

I was about to mention this. I know of at least two (very) hot S13 YC companies that either built their web app in Rails or explicitly deal with Rails (not sure if One Month Rails is built in Rails or not, but it is pretty explicitly pro-Rails). Does Rails prevalence preclude Ruby from being a dying language? Depends on what you mean by dying. The dominance of Rails is probably something of a blessing and a curse for the broader Ruby world. I'm too new to it to have a strong position, but I will say that as a novice developer, I went with Ruby and Rails because there is a fantastic suite of tools for learning from scratch.

Mikeb853• 13 years ago

Rails is a curse. Because of it, Ruby (which is a fantastic language) has been reduced to a web language, when it's really much more than that.

yannski3• 13 years ago

Well there's a broad range of applications that simply can't be built with Rails. And that's shame. It's a corollary to the other commenter saying that Rails no longer fits the new web programming paradigms.

bencollier49• 13 years ago

"The few exceptions prove the rule".

I don't think this means what he thinks it means.

neals• 13 years ago

Just a few of my cats are male. This proves that all my cats are female. Right?

randomknowledge• 13 years ago

The most charitable interpretation of the claim I could think of was that the author meant the few exceptions illustrate why the other companies are moving away from ruby.

bronson• 13 years ago

It's just another hand-waved argument in the whole confused post. If the dude's approach to code matches his approach to writing then we have nothing to worry about.

talkingquickly• 13 years ago

Agreed, I think the author has mis-understood what it means. Quite a common one to get wrong though, for anyone wondering it generally means that stating an exception proves/ establishes/ implies that a general rule exists.

E.g. You may not play ball in the park within 20 metres of the road implies that the general rules is that you can play ball elsewhere in the park.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

thenonsequitur3• 13 years ago

I think he's taking as axiomatic that there only a few people using ruby, thus claiming this demonstrates the general rule people don't use ruby. Thus he is, in fact, using the phrase correctly.

But by taking it as axiomatic that few people use ruby, he is begging the question.

al2o3cr• 13 years ago

Similarly, C and Java are dying since nobody touts their use of them in PR materials. Also Postgres and HTTP. /snark

Technology hipsterism != technology vitality.

wil421• 13 years ago

But my start up isn't cool if we aren't using the newest and greatest buzzword technologies.

d0m• 13 years ago

It depends of the language I suppose. Ruby was all about being new, cool and fun. Call that hipsterism if you want. But now that people moved on, it's fair to ask ourselves "Who is going to use Ruby for their next project?". Big company? No. Hipsters? No. You? Maybe : )

jmagoon2• 13 years ago

I work at a big company and we use ruby all the time. It's a powerful scripting language that we can rapidly develop in for the 1000s (literally) of small programs that need to work with our legacy unix systems.

dcu• 13 years ago

...until people realize the mess that is node.js. I would rather say Rails is dying because it no longer fits the new web programming paradigms.

girvo3• 13 years ago

So very much this.

I never really learnt Rails, to be honest. I dabbled, but never got fully into it. The thing is, the way I'm writing web apps now (nice API's over straight classes, composable libraries, and a routing layer over the top to give it a REST interface) doesn't fit my mental model of how Rails works.

Similarly, I've somewhat abandoned "MVC" for web-apps. Nice API's with the ability to have any front-end, not kicking out HTML from my framework, and the like -- that's what I'm doing now.

Don't get me wrong -- I know that Rails (especially 4) can do all this as well. Heck, there's not much stopping me from doing what I'm doing here with straight Ruby, a couple of libraries and Sinatra (I have a good friend who does exactly that). But for some reason, I've instead written off ruby entirely for that use-case.

I'm merely the n=1 here though, and as a non-ruby programmer, my opinion doesn't mean much I guess. But I find it curious how I ended up skipping it.

jalopy2• 13 years ago

Interesting, as that's very much how my mental model of how Rails works:

1. The routing layer is all about declaring a resource which gives you all 7 major REST operations, and

2. there's a nice facility for responding_to any data format (html, json, js, text, etc) you want.

With rails scaffolding, you can pretty much get all boilerplate code written for you, and have it very simply implement a REST backend for a more "heavyweight" javascript framework (angular, ember, etc).

I wonder if the issue is that rails didn't originally start out this way, and now people assume that Rails is stuck in the past?

I think the article gets it right in that Ruby needs better concurrency primitives (promises are a nice idea), and esp better performance. If Javascript can be as fast as it is with V8, there should be nothing stopping Ruby from achieving similar levels of performance.

cryptolect2• 13 years ago

As someone who programs when the urge hits, rather than as a day job, I ended up playing catch up with Rails. Each time I went to start a project, there's be some new changes/features in Rails for me to learn.

These days, I'm happy coding away in Padrino, which seems to sit between Sinatra and Rails in terms of features and functionality.

For me, Rails just became too big to keep up with. It's more fun and productive with a lighter-weight framework that can get you 90% of the way there. For a newcomer to Ruby, it doesn't seem to be the old "watch me write a blog engine in 5 minutes!" anymore. That might be why the other popular frameworks are getting the attention...

Kiro2• 13 years ago

So what do you use for the front-end? How is it communicating with your API?

z92• 13 years ago

what are the new web programming paradigms?

dasil0034• 13 years ago

Thick-client.

jackweirdy• 13 years ago

Why is node.js a mess?

outside12342• 13 years ago

It isn't. But its fun to say with all your hipster garb on.

laichzeit0• 13 years ago

Compared to e.g. Java API documentation, I find node.js documentation to be an amateurish attempt at best.

integraton3• 13 years ago

JavaScript is a messy language, but ignoring that, the module ecosystem is a mess. There are many duplicated modules, many of them done in a half-assed manner by inexperienced developers and rarely updated.

For example, the Node community absolutely loves MongoDB for inexplicable reasons, and support for other datastores is terrible. Despite Postgres supporting hstore for years and Node being popular for years, the two hstore modules are "node-postgres-hstore" (7 stars on github) which hasn't been updated in 1 year and "node-hstore" (17 stars on github) that hasn't been updated in 2 years. Everything I've seen indicates that this is typical for modules in Node.

Meanwhile, Ruby and Rails support Postgres extremely well at this point.

Similarly, node has several migration libraries, all of which are pretty limited. One of the popular ones, "node-migrate" by one of the most prolific node module developers, still has an open issue from 2 years ago about using timestamped migrations, with the developer commenting as if the concept is news to him (https://github.com/visionmedia/node-migrate/issues/2)

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

Node.JS is great when you simply need to move bits from disk onto the network with minimal processing in between and your app is otherwise I/O bound. This is what gives Node.JS its superficial appeal. The trouble comes when you need to write anything of complexity and you find yourself in callback hell and your code becomes difficult to reason about at an unreasonable rate. This makes adding new features to any large code base a ghastly nightmare.

JavaScript is also a really shitty, poorly conceived language with cruft galore, and this compounds the hell of event-driven programming.

I dropped Node.JS because it made me hate programming.

Kiro2• 13 years ago

If you're talking about single-page apps I don't think it's the new web programming paradigm. Most applications fit much better as classic sites which Rails is so good at. In fact I think most SPAs I've seen would be better off with a "traditional" stack. I always find myself thinking "why is this even a SPA?".

notwedtm• 13 years ago

Um, wut?

This post is so confusing. I see some half thought out ideas, but no solutions.

Ruby may not be Java or JavaScript, but why would you want it to be? You have Java and JavaScript for times when you want to use Java or JavaScript.

Use the right tool for the job.

davidw2• 13 years ago

No, Ruby died last month, but now it's cool again in a retro sort of way. Node.js is what's dying this week. Next month, Tcl is going to make a comeback.

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

Oh God, I certainly hope so.

girvo3• 13 years ago

Everything is a string!

Seriously, I don't mind Tcl at all. Does that make me crazy?

jaequery• 13 years ago

i sincerely think that what ruby just needs is just a really good wordpress alternative.

dasil0034• 13 years ago

I disagree. The strength of ruby is in rapid development. It is not best for performance, installation or deployment. Therefore it's good for teams building software, but it will never be good for install-your-own open source software like WordPress. Since the vast majority of WordPress users never even look at the code there is absolutely nothing to be gained by not using PHP.

debacle• 13 years ago

Every language has advocates that believe that. The reality is that no one writes WordPress in any one of those languages because PHP, warts and all, is a language for getting things done.

Mikeb853• 13 years ago

Rails is dying.

Ruby isn't. It just isn't as popular amongst hipster web programmers anymore...

There's some very interesting things going on in the non-Rails and non-web framework Ruby world...

the_watcher4• 13 years ago

What is the evidence that Rails is dying? The programming bootcamp movement is primarily Rails-based, One Month Rails just came out of YC, and I know of at least one other S13 YC company who built their web app in Rails. What seems to have changed is that not every startup is being built with Rails anymore, which I'd say is a positive thing that does not mean Rails is dying.

Mikeb853• 13 years ago

The hype is dying. I also think the web is moving beyond the Rails model...

peteratt• 13 years ago

Totally agree with your point. Though it might seem that Rails has scaling problems and is regarded as slow and painful once the system matures, there are many many other applications to the language in itself. Plus, there's a lot to be done on the performance side of things. Ruby compilers have come a long way, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.

Just look at Puppet. It is so awesome, and it's implemented in Ruby. Ruby is definitely growing like a weed among the devops community.

stormcrowsx• 13 years ago

I'm primarily a Java Developer, I tried Rails recently for the first time on a project without a SQL datastore and found that it was difficult to get a foothold as a beginner.

Switched to Scala Play and the more flexible framework allowed what I needed easily even without a lot of knowledge on Play. Rails seems like it would be great if your doing a typical CRUD app but if you need something a little outside that box it gets in the way.

That said it seems like apps aren't always just CRUD anymore and that may be why its falling in popularity.

ebonfortress4• 13 years ago

Yeah, "real-time" is the big thing now but there no mainstream tools to simplify the development of such apps, so we're pretty much in Perl + CGI era. The ones that exist offer much looser coupling between client and server than required or just plain weird.

rhapsodyv• 13 years ago

The post doesn't point to any data proving the point. I'm curios from where he had concluded that ruby is dying...

yannski3• 13 years ago

From his media trainer, certainly...

kookster2• 13 years ago

+1 this: sensational headline = controversy = hackernews frontpage

eric9702• 13 years ago

You don't need data to back up bold claims when your ego is the size of a watermelon.

beat4• 13 years ago

Businesses (meaning Big Business, I suppose) don't reject Ruby because it's "a dying language". They reject it because they're inherently conservative. Java and .Net rule the roost because they're seen as safe, respectable choices.

The appearance of risk is more important to most businesses than actual risk. Ruby isn't dominant, therefore it is perceived as risky. Java's complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project, but it's not "risky" because it's dominant.

smacktoward3• 13 years ago

Java and .NET are also backed by ginormous corporations (Oracle and Microsoft), which big business also generally views as a major risk-mitigating factor.

(It isn't really -- in fact it's the opposite, "corporate" platforms tend to die out faster than open-source ones, at least in my experience -- but they think it is, which in this discussion is all that matters.)

klaustopher• 13 years ago

Also, let's not forget about IBM, HP, RedHat and all the other shops that back Java

xs_kid2• 13 years ago

Oracle has some JRuby apps on production

pnathan• 13 years ago

Java and .NET are also backed by ginormous corporations (Oracle and Microsoft), which big business also generally views as a major risk-mitigating factor.

This is a big deal. Particularly for risk mitigation and CYA when something goes wrong. No one got fired for buying IBM, as was once said.

Argorak13• 13 years ago

The story that Big Business is not using Ruby is just that - a story. On the first RailsConf i've been to (RailsConf Europe 2007), most attendees were actually working for Big Biz.

I have spent most of my ruby career in large companies, even for Padrino work. No one builds a multi-million dollar project in Ruby. But one or the other frontend for that. Some of the services. The deployment tooling, be it Chef or Puppet. Ruby is a surprisingly flexible language and can be successfully used on or off the JVM, which large companies just _like_.

This blog post reeks of negativity and speaks of a willingness to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

laureny5• 13 years ago

On the first RailsConf i've been to (RailsConf Europe 2007), most attendees were actually working for Big Biz.

Selection bias.

Go to a COBOL conference and you'll likely find that most attendees work in Big Biz as well. What does that tell you?

darylfritz• 13 years ago

I work in a large corporation. We use Microsoft .NET (recently converted from Java). At home, I develop with Ruby for smaller pet projects and personal things.

I would attend a Ruby/Rails conference, and I work for a "big business". That doesn't mean that my "big business" uses Ruby.

jbooth• 13 years ago

It's worth noting that Ruby's metaprogramming model goes a bit beyond the mere appearance of risk, in many people's opinions. Maybe we're wrong, but it's not like we're avoiding it because it's got a small install base (it doesn't) or nobody's heard of it (we all have, for most of a decade now).

smoyer2• 13 years ago

I was ready to leave Java for enterprise projects, but the name change (J2EE to JavaEE) was accompanied by a dramatic simplification and modularization of the framework. These changes have made me much happier AND more productive as a Java developer, so it's my contention that Java is far more entrenched in the enterprise than it was even 4 years ago.

beat4• 13 years ago

Alas, it's still kind of a mess. The #1 improvement made to Java imho has been dependency injection in Spring and Hibernate. But this dependency injection pretty much kills all the compile-time sanity checking that compiled languages are supposed to provide. It's great when it works, but when it doesn't, it just barfs out useless stack traces that don't actually show you where the problem occurred.

macspoofing• 13 years ago

The appearance of risk is more important to most businesses than actual risk. Ruby isn't dominant, therefore it is perceived as risky ...

That's not quite right. Anecdotally, I've seen or read about big corps using hot JS front-end frameworks like Angular and Backbone, server frameworks and databases like Node.js, MongoDB and Redis, and programming languages like Python, Erlang and Scala in production. Even if you look at the big tech corps (such as Yahoo, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon), internally there isn't a whole lot of Ruby either. The big poster-child for Ruby, Twitter, is now most known for migrating away from Ruby than for actually using it.

I'm not a Ruby guy, but it doesn't seem like cliche corporate conservatism is what's holding Ruby back. It looks like it's Ruby, and specifically the Ruby platform. Maybe pretty Ruby language semantics aren't enough to make up for Ruby platform downsides. Maybe there just isn't a good reason to use Ruby.

Java's complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project

The choice of Java would not threaten the survival of any small project. Though Java is (still) not a very pretty language, the tooling around it has gotten enormously better from where we were in, say, 2003. Current frameworks like JEE, Spring and Play are actually pretty great to work with.

jliechti1• 13 years ago

Indeed, I wanted to mention this as well.

Furthermore, I think Python (actually Jython) is starting to become for prevalent in the enterprise space. I've seen a few different enterprise software suites from companies like IBM and HP that support writing extensions in Jython. I know that the JVM implementation of Ruby is JRuby, but is anyone using that in production? Jython seems relatively more stable/mature, but I really don't know much about JRuby.

schappim• 13 years ago

I'd actually say the poster child for Ruby is Github. GitHub is a collection of small Sinatra Web Apps.

ebonfortress4• 13 years ago

It seems that Ruby never won over Python in big tech companies. Probably it has something to do with Python being widespread in science (as far as I understand, tech companies are dominated by graduates from the best colleges) - if you're a graduate, you already know a scripting language, why learn another one?

laureny5• 13 years ago

They reject it because they're inherently conservative

Not just that. They reject Ruby because

1. It's very slow and continues to be very slow despite all the performance work being done on it (nod to JRuby).

2. It's just hard to hire Ruby developers, who are getting more scarce every year.

These are the symptoms of a dying language.

subsection1h• 13 years ago

It's just hard to hire Ruby developers, who are getting more scarce every year.

Citation?

Why would Ruby developers be getting more scare? Are they retiring earlier than Java developers?

lobster_johnson• 13 years ago

1. It's very slow

Benchmarks these days show Ruby 1.9/2.0 as being a wee bit faster than Python, and it's improving. That's still much slower than Java, of course, but then that's a bad comparison; Ruby and Python are better comparisons.

jmagoon2• 13 years ago

If you provided sources, I would maybe think this was something beyond a personal axe you have to grind.

Seeing as how you've fit the classic "respond to every post" argumentative style.

gesman2• 13 years ago

Lets face it - Ruby is a great language and wrapped with Rails it allows to craft napkin idea to working, real-world prototype in record short amount of time.

These capabilities prove to be golden for Silicon Valley startups where speed of execution means difference between life and death (VC or nothing).

Once done - startups are praying for a quick exit until the issues of gems mess, scaling, performance and deployment nightmares start raising their ugly heads and requires ample continuous investments in administration and management talents to keep things afloat.

Serious multi-billion enterprises need performance, guarantees of commercial support from big vendor, speed of compiled languages and cannot afford to use interpreted languages and have their feet stuck in all that swamp.

Hence they use Java and dot NET. That's a fact of life.

lectrick2• 13 years ago

Given that you will have to figure out scaling issues eventually anyway, the speed of compiled languages should NOT be weighed heavier than programming ease in your decisionmaking. Programmer time is FAR more expensive than hardware these days.

free652• 13 years ago

Actually it matters a lot. Since when the programmers manage servers? More servers = more people managing them. And if for a compiled language you need 2 data centers for Ruby you need 20... And level 4 data centers are expensive.

Ruby is great at what it does. I don't see Node.js replacing it anytime soon. But Ruby won't be in enterprise anytime soon also.

gesman2• 13 years ago

Throwing money in hardware to compensate for chosen framework's sluggishness doesn't seems to run well with people who sign the checks.

jalopy2• 13 years ago

I've toed this line for a long time, but concern about performance is really starting to be an issue for me when I make a decision about what language/framework to use. Here's my line of thinking:

" If another language can provide 10x more performance in 2x the code of Ruby, that's a tradeoff I'd seriously consider.

If I do ever have a hit on my hands, and it starts scaling quickly, there's a cost, management, and maintenance issue to bottlenecking myself with Ruby. "

I realize that there are many parts to a system and that other parts encounter scaling considerations before the programming language does - ie database.

However, it seems there are known, quick to implement solutions that can solve the data scaling problem in a cost effective manner. Reimplementing my application logic with another language seems to be a very cost-ineffective and time consuming task.

I'd rather head that concern off at the pass by picking that language with 10x the performance and 2x the amount of code.

raganwald• 13 years ago

Lets face it - Ruby is a great language

I'm not sure that is a premise that can be tossed out as axiomatic before making an argument.

herge• 13 years ago

The type of performance, guarantees of commercial support, and quality of product that only serious multi-billion enterprises like CGI federal can provide!

There are no silver bullets in software development; all projects can fail. The only difference is that with ruby or other dynamic languages, it'll fail faster and cheaper.

kookster2• 13 years ago

Many Rails folks have moved on to other things, many of them to Node.js, and in general development is becoming less homogenous (i.e. Go services interacting with a Rails app/middleware, and an Angular.js front-end). This is a good thing; we are seeing people more willing to use the right tool for the job rather than trying to use one language for everything.

jwarzech• 13 years ago

This. I think of any of the comments so far you express what I'm seeing as well (I know 'use case of 1'). Distributed & modularized apps where each component uses the language/framework best suited for the job.

eric9702• 13 years ago

[rant] If you're going to claim that your strong opinions are facts, please treat them as such and give citations or back them up yourself. [/rant]

Ruby is not my favorite language anymore, but I still use it and see evidence that there is a huge place it fills in the dev community and ecosystem. I have never used a more expressive language. I'm stating this as a fact from what I have experienced, and I'm giving points that back it up. There are dozens of actively maintained Ruby projects, some of which are the most popular repos on GitHub. I don't see any evidence that the Ruby ecosystem is on a downward trend of activity and is "dying", so I have no reason to think otherwise.

This kind of stuff reminds me why I take breaks from HackerNews every once in a while -_- Yuck.

lectrick2• 13 years ago

If you love a tool, it won't die. Period.

And lots of people (myself included) still love Ruby.

And I finally released a potentially useful gem for medium to large Ruby/Rails codebases. Are unmitigated monkeypatches complexifying your codebase to the point of pain? I wrote a gem to help manage that...

https://github.com/pmarreck/pachinko

starrhorne• 13 years ago

There are 20-30 ruby conferences every year in the US alone. I've been to about 7. They all had > 200 attendees. Even the less-known ones tend to sell out well in advance.

Freelance rates for ruby developers are crazy-high. In Seattle, at least, I'm seeing $200/hr as not uncommon.

And on a side note, PHP has been around for about 80 years now and it's still moving along.

So I don't think ruby/rails are going to "die" any time soon.

jaredonline2• 13 years ago

Thank you for being the first comment (I've seen) that actually looks at some amount of data. It's hard to read "most Rails people are moving on", "Rails and Ruby don't find the new web model" and "node.js is replacing Ruby" over and over without anyone saying how they're coming to their conclusions.

My thoughts are the same as yours... Ruby and/or Rails aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Just think, Rails powers the site that stores most startups code. It may not be as shiny and new as it was, but there's still a lot of usage.

bybjorn• 13 years ago

More like 20 years, but yeah, I guess 20 Internet Years equals around 80 standard years..

thenonsequitur3• 13 years ago

Interestingly, Ruby is also approaching its 20-year anniversary. Of course, PHP has been popular much longer than Ruby.

reuven2• 13 years ago

Yes, exactly. If Ruby is dying, then why are Ruby conferences popping up everywhere? Why are Ruby developers in desperately short supply?

I live in Israel, where Ruby has taken a while to make inroads. But we just had a conference last week, and the many attendees were super excited about the language. And companies were desperate to find employees who know Ruby and/or Rails.

Indeed, the biggest reason that I've found companies give for avoiding the use of Ruby is the scarcity of experienced developers. A client of mine switched from Ruby to PHP last year, simply because he could easily find PHP programmers, and they cost a lot less. You could argue that this points to companies leaving Ruby, but in many ways, I'd say that it rather indicates Ruby is a victim of its own success.

Even if Ruby is dying (which I don't think is the case), plenty of seemingly dead languages are still in demand, and are used on all sorts of projects. You can command great consulting rates in COBOL, today, if you want.

Both Ruby and Rails have strong, active communities that are pushing the language and framework forward in all sorts of interesting ways. The key to a successful open-source project is the community, so I'm pretty confident that I'll be working in Ruby for at least a few more years. But hey, if the author wants to work in something else, power to him; we're fortunate to be living in an era of many high-quality, open-source languages.

integraton3• 13 years ago

There are also more job listings on Angel List referencing Ruby (640) than jobs referencing Node / Node.js (399) or Python (454).

malero• 13 years ago

Indeed.com

Ruby: 6,401 Python: 8,299 .NET: 26,711 Java: 36,069

An interesting switch is: Django Developer: 1,199 Rails Developer: 3,682

I don't think Ruby, Python, etc will die anytime soon. There are too many small businesses that need products developed fast. PHP on the other hand...

PHP Developer: 10,317 What?! ;)

adamkittelson• 13 years ago

This post really needed to follow up on the whole "Ruby is dying" part with some sort of "and here's how Rubinius X can help" part.

The way it's written has caused everyone here to debate whether or not Ruby is dying and completely ignore the announcement. I'm sure the title of the HN link isn't helping either.

regularfry• 13 years ago

That would be in the first link.

otikik• 13 years ago

http://x.rubini.us/

I like everything I read there except undefined. I have been using Lua for a while now and having only two falsy values is great. I am not convinced adding a third is a good trade-off.

static_typed• 13 years ago

Ruby is not dead, it just smells that way. Seriously though, it's demise is a little overstated - the BBC for one use it quite a bit, as do quite a few startups. The author of the post seems a bit butthurt that Ruby has not surplanted all other technologies - and it never will.

One big problem is that for most businesses their first and perhaps last taste of Ruby comes from Rails, and it's security fails. That is a shame.

Having been burnt by the failed promises of Rails ourselves, our company moved onto Python, and never looked back.

Also, Ruby is just one tool in the kit, fine for some jobs, patently unsuitable for many others. The evangelists should realise this, and not do a disservice to Ruby by trying to shove it into every place and frankly pissing off potential future adopters of that technology.

thinkpad20• 13 years ago

A baseless, attention-grabbing headline, a vague language spec that doesn't really seem to be adding any new ideas (and indeed rejecting some good ones), and no actual working code. Get back to me when you actually write something; until then all this is is a glorified blog post with a "wouldn't it be nice if there were ____ language out there?"

dasil0034• 13 years ago

The hyperbole is undermining the point.

27182818284• 13 years ago

It has definitely lost the cool edge that it had. In the midwestern US, it takes longer for trends to penetrate and I saw the Ruby height in popularity here after it had been eating Hacker News alive for a while. Now out here, it is definitely Node.js. All the new young developers talk about it. The old PHP devs in town talk about it, but can't switch to it because all of their libraries and business is in PHP, etc.

Interestingly enough, event-loop non-blocking, etc is NEVER the reason mentioned by the devs interested in it and using it. They only mention how nice it is to have basically the same language in the frontend and backend. They claim not having your brain switch like that is a huge benefit (which I could believe, but I haven't tried. (Python+Django+Flask dev myself))

SmileyKeith• 13 years ago

Ruby just seems to be actually getting used by large projects. I personally think that makes sense because you want to see that a language can stand some sort of test of time before entirely adopting it. I think what Jeff Atwood had to say about it [1] when choosing to use it for Discourse [2] shows a different opinion that this article. One that I agree with more.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html [2]: http://www.discourse.org/

smacktoward3• 13 years ago

Atwood's argument boils down to "I wanted to work with this one guy, and what he uses is Ruby." Which is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't really say much about the popularity of the language among programmers in general.

cromwellian• 13 years ago

I'm going to lose a lot of karma of this one, but here we go. The organizations I know of that have switched from Ruby to Java have done so for the following reasons:

1) Performance. The JVM simply scales better, it is more cost effective in the datacenter. Without mentioning names, I know of significant Silicon Valley darlings that spent huge sums trying to scale Ruby, got crushed, and eventually ripped-and-replaced the backends with Java.

2) Skill Availability. There are 7+ million Java programmers, it is easier to hire Java programmers.

3) Tool Availability and Maturity.

I think Ruby is a fine language, but I see it like PHP, great for rapid prototyping and productivity in the small, but it's version 1 for the lean startup or for the corporate departmental app. Version 2 is Java, C#, etc using the UX and product feature lessons learned from the Ruby prototype.

IMHO, Node.js is the new Ruby. It has the benefit of having the same language on the client and the server, but once again, it's going to run into similar scalability issues when large organizations try to use it. I think we're going to run into the same issues, of it becoming a cool bandwagon, the platform being stretched to its breaking point, followed by the realization that there are serious problems.

tonyedgecombe• 13 years ago

I think a bigger change is the JVM and .Net don't suck so much now. There are interesting languages like Scala and Groovy on the JVM and frameworks like Play and MVC on .Net that make development less painful.

microtonal2• 13 years ago

I think a bigger change is the JVM and .Net don't suck so much now.

Frankly, JVM hasn't really sucked since it got a JIT compiler (J2SE 1.2, 1998) or if you prefer the switch to HotSpot as the default VM (J2SE 1.3, 2000).

blueblob• 13 years ago

I guess JRuby is trying to address the first point and they wouldn't have to retrain their staff. I don't know how popular JRuby is but it runs on the JVM.

Argorak13• 13 years ago

Most of these stories also contain a lot of "we used a monolithic approach first and then split it up". A lot of companies I know kept their frontends in Rails, because its frontend tooling is really good. But you'll never write the big backend processing part in Rails.

Also, this is a question of resources. Once your first version succeeds, you suddenly have the funds to build a complex version where you care about all the small details.

Ruby is a _very good_ language as long as you are in the "I don't need to tune all the details phase".

spullara4• 13 years ago

Twitter got a huge performance and efficiency boost even rewriting the front end on the JVM (in Scala).

reuven2• 13 years ago

As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, I don't think that people are leaving Ruby in the droves that the author claims. Ruby isn't dying, and Rails isn't dying, at least not right now.

However, the author does point to problems in Ruby's performance and maturity that are problems and issues -- if not immediately, then down the road. Your point about how people are leaving Ruby in favor of people, tools, and performance in the Java world is a good one. I would like to think that JRuby is a good option for such people, but maybe not.

I found the author's ideas for modernizing Ruby to be interesting. I didn't agree with all of them, but at least he's trying to hash out some possible ways in which Ruby could improve. This sounds like a wish list for Ruby 3.0, though -- interesting ideas that would break compatibility, and that will take a while to implement. Perhaps his work, and that of Rubinius, could show us the way forward to such a new version.

bhauer• 13 years ago

JRuby, at least in my experience, has not yet delivered performance in line with my expectations of a JVM-hosted language.

In my opinion, performance is by a huge margin the chief reason I do not begin new projects on Ruby. I would rather defer performance tuning efforts and scale complexity until much later in projects' life, rather than immediately following launch when I have 100 concurrent users hitting the application.

marcocampos2• 13 years ago

I don't know why people keep complaining about Ruby's (MRI) speed. Yes, it's not that fast but for most programmer's doing web development it doesn't matter. Remember, you are (probably) not writing the next Twitter/Facebook/whatever. You are (probably) writing a boring LOB web application.

Not everyone is working on a startup trying to peddle their stuff to a zillion users and getting hammered in the process. If you ever get to Twitter/Facebook/whatever size no out-of-box solution is going to work. You'll end up doing what Twitter did which is re-architect all their infrastructure/code and tune all their stuff as much has possible.

Ruby's issue IMHO is that it has always been a Rails-centric community/ecosystem and never had the change to grow beyond that. It's still largely used to write web stuff and nothing else. Python, which is a "similar" language, has a much healthier and more diverse ecosystem being used in things like scientific computing or computer vision.

If you want to make Ruby better, grow beyond the web application ecosystem and make it more diverse.

Argorak13• 13 years ago

I agree with the Rails-centrism issue. Even alternative web frameworks have a hard time in the Ruby world.

I disagree with the assumption that Ruby is web only. E.g. Chef and Puppet are huge efforts that have no direct connection to frontend web, both written in Ruby. Vagrant as well. Ruby is big in the infrastructure world.

xs_kid2• 13 years ago

There are people working on it, see for example: http://sciruby.com/

redwall_hp• 13 years ago

It's still largely used to write web stuff and nothing else.

Vagrant? Homebrew? Jekyll?

mcantelon• 13 years ago

IMHO, Node.js is the new Ruby

That seems a bit apples-to-oranges to me. The degree of hype is similar, yes, but other than that they seem like different animals. Ruby started slow (performance-wise), with memory leaks (that were denied at first), and was predominantly a community development. Node.js is running on top of V8, which is mature, performant, and backed by Google.

briantakita2• 13 years ago

Plus it's evented so it's not really I/O bound, which makes it great as a service glue.

Also, node.js with browserify & grunt makes for a great front end packaging & dependency tool.

mbillie13• 13 years ago

V8 was first released in 2008 - and while it is awesome, "mature" sounds like a bit of a reach...

colinza2• 13 years ago

"Skill Availability"... riiight.

You know, one of these days this argument might catch on in other industries. For instance you go to the doctor and say "Doctor, I have a sore throat" and the doctor replies "Well, you might need your tonsils removed, but in order to do that we'd need to hire competent surgeons - how about we just punch you in the face until you forget about your throat"

Afton• 13 years ago

How is that relevant? You can solve the same problems in Java as you can in Ruby. An ENT surgeon is not interchangeable with a physical therapist.

qwerta2• 13 years ago

I believe Node.js has solid technical foundations and it will not run into same troubles as Ruby or PHP. There are millions poured into JS research, Ruby never had decent GC or JIT. Also Node.js code base and unit tests are solid, not like client side JS.

Also there are modern strongly typed languages which compile into JS and run just fine on Node.JS. This solves code-base scalability for large teams..

mbillie13• 13 years ago

I agree that Node.js is technically solid, but the Ruby/Rails code bases and communities have an immeasurably larger and more mature testing culture than JS/Node... and "modern strongly typed languages compiling to JS" does not by any means solve code-base scalability problems for large teams. That claim is simply false. There are boatloads of experienced Java developers. The people who tend to write "strongly typed languages compiling to JS" tend to write those languages, and not JS.

To be clear: the web would not be what it is without JS, and Node is a fascinating and innovative thing. I disagree that there are loads of people who are experienced in C/C++ are champing at the bit to go write Node. The Java/C# talent pool is massively larger than the non-frontend JS talent pool at this time, and the C/C++ talent pool is largely otherwise occupied. That could change... but it hasn't changed yet. The HN/startup scene is not representative of the software industry at large, and a lot of people writing these "languages that can compile to JS" are part of the industry at large.

ebonfortress4• 13 years ago

V8 is backed up by Google, I guess that's pretty big deal.

jcroll• 13 years ago

PHP has HHVM, Symfony, and Composer; it does not suffer from any of these problems. Ruby is dying, PHP is the future.

stock_toaster• 13 years ago

  > IMHO, Node.js is the new Ruby. It has the benefit of
  > having the same language on the client and the server,
  > but once again, it's going to run into similar
  > scalability issues when large organizations try to use
  > it. I think we're going to run into the same issues, 
  > of it becoming a cool bandwagon, the platform being 
  > stretched to its breaking point, followed by the 
  > realization that there are serious problems.

I think Elixir[0] may be the new hyped language. PragProg seems to be positioning[1] themselves[2] for a hype cycle on it, at the very least.

  [0]: http://elixir-lang.org
  [1]: http://pragprog.com/magazines/2013-06/programming-elixir
  [2]: http://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir

dingdingdang• 13 years ago

No matter the whole hype cycle I do actually reckon Elixir is positioned to be the new leader on the programming-web-front: being underpinned by Erlang means it is the ONLY platform/language out there so far with super solid scalability to rival Java AND a light/novel way of programming. That being said I'm personally doing fine with newer versions of PHP (which for my purposes are solid and fine when backed by best practices and prepared sql statements!)

thatthatis• 13 years ago

Is it reasonable to paraphrase what you're saying as:

When developers are more expensive than servers, rails makes sense.

When servers are more expensive than developers (because of scale), Java/c# start to make sense.

habitue2• 13 years ago

Or because you straight don't need an army of super capable developers once an organization is large. You need people keeping the lights on and maintaining the momentum

ultimoo• 13 years ago

> PHP is great for rapid prototyping

A few of the worlds most trafficked websites use PHP is production: wikipedia, facebook, wordpress, and hundreds of other bb forums.

ebonfortress4• 13 years ago

Yes, Node.js is the new Ruby on Rails. It's amazing how EventMachine and other similar frameworks failed to gain traction.

bradleyland• 13 years ago

I'm kind of disappointed in the way the author is approaching the launch of Rubinius X. The "death of Ruby" is being used as a rhetorical device. The strategy appears to be that if we all believe that Ruby is actually dying, we're more likely to get behind Rubinius X. Unfortunately, no support is provided for this claim.

Rubinius has always been the Ruby that placed purity before pragmatism. I applaud them for that, but putting forth the assertion that Ruby is dying as a means to drum up support for a new generation of Ruby seems like getting off on the wrong foot.

dragonwriter4• 13 years ago

Ruby does seem to be, if not dying, at least losing a lot of the buzz it had a few years back, but mostly that seems to be because Rails has lost the buzz it had, and much of Ruby's buzz was actually not Ruby buzz, but Rails buzz.

That being said, I think the vision Rubinius X has about where Ruby should go is great -- both in terms of language features and conventions -- and I think that besides the specific details, the high-level strategic vision is something Ruby needs.

habitue2• 13 years ago

It is suspicious though that the Rubinius project just lost funding from Engine Yard, and now (like a week later?) the maintainer has declared Ruby dead and Rubinius X is the answer. It seems like death throes (of Rubinius) to me, rather than any substantial commentary on Ruby in general.

desireco42• 13 years ago

This is such a flame bait :) Does Rubinius really needs this?

I installed it last week and trying it out with Rails 4 to see how it feels. Ruby is alive and well. And mainstream.

davidroetzel• 13 years ago

I have so many thoughts about this post right now, that I find it hard to put them into a coherent comment. Still, I want them out there:

1) I, too, feel that Ruby is no longer as fashionable as it used to be. I do not think this to be much of a problem and more like the natural way fashions work. But I still think the effect can be observed. It was not long ago that I learned about a cool new project written in Ruby here on HN on a weekly basis. These days, it has become a rare occurence.

2) It is a fact that the "cool kids" have moved on. But there is not the one big new thing. Rather, people who were popular in the Ruby world 5 years ago use Scala, Clojure, Node.js, Go and a few other things these days.

3) Still, Rails seems to be very popular with startups. Maybe not with the ones that are highly technical. But many of those just trying to get a mvp out there seem to default to rails these days.

4) I love Ruby. I used to love learning new programming languages. But ever since writing Ruby code on a daily basis, other languages most often fail to attract me. And I no longer look at technical benefits. Instead I take a look at the syntax and most often I am annoyed. Ruby has this effect on _some_ people, but not on others. For those who do not care about Ruby's aesthetics, there is probably little to keep them from trying out other languages.

5) There is little in the list of features on x.rubini.us that I disagree with. But at the same time, there is nothing I ever missed. Also, I am not convinced that all of those issues can or should be solved on the interpreter level.

6) Instead of a list of features, I would love to see a list of the kinds of applications that would benefit from those. I am not convinced that Node.js-style network services should be the future of Ruby.

websitescenes• 13 years ago

This post is hilarious but all jokes aside I am still interested to see what "Rubinius X" turns out to be.

cryptolect2• 13 years ago

The most common complaint I hear when I talk about Ruby is it's poor performance. The languages I hear mentioned most often (by the complainers) as alternatives include Go and Node.js.

I've used Ruby for a few years as a part-time coder. In that time I've never ventured out to try the variety of Ruby interpreters available. For instance, I've heard of JRuby, and I have also heard it's really fast, but it just seems like it's intended for "enterprise" use-cases, rather than my day to day scenarios.

If there are all these faster Ruby interpreter variants out there, one 'evangelism' approach could simply be to make them more visible and approachable to end-users.

There's also opportunities for package maintainers to work to make these alternatives available in the various Linux/Unix distributions. I want to be able to apt-get them, rather than hunt down a PPA or build via RVM.

Is there anything else beyond speed that is holding Ruby back from greater mindshare?

rip7472• 13 years ago

IIS integration period the end.

well that was argument awhile back. nowadays with products like Helicon Zoo (which i use for development), it make integrating a rails (or php, python, cfml) site with IIS a breeze. seriously, if you're using IIS and want to run a rails site, you should have looked at Helicon Zoo.

thenonsequitur3• 13 years ago

First, let me start by saying I'm a day-to-day Ruby developer and I absolutely love the language. That said, there are things besides the speed that prevent the acceptance of Ruby among people:

* No static type checking, potentially resulting in more bugs * Ease of monkey-patching, potentially resulting in insecurities * Rampant use of hash-as-arguments, resulting in method definitions that don't actually define their arguments (though Ruby 2.0 fixes this with named parameters, it's still a common pattern) * Heavy use of symbols, which some people see as the moral equivalent of magic strings

I personally think all of these arguments are bunk except for the over-use of hash-as-arguments even in Ruby 2.0. But some people give them credence.

dasil0034• 13 years ago

You mentioned performance and packaging. There's also concurrency issues but those are improving.

The most interesting critique of Ruby I've heard recently was from Tom Stuart @ Ruby Manor this year:

http://lanyrd.com/2013/ruby-manor/scffpd/

In this talk he demonstrated how the multi-paradigm nature of Ruby makes it hard to fully realize the benefits of a single paradigm like FP or OOP.

This is obviously not something that CTOs are bringing up in tech provisioning discussions, but I think it does prevent ruby from having the kind of strengths that would make it a go-to language for certain types of projects the way that Go, Scala, Node.js or Haskell are able to do these days. I think Ruby's biggest appeal is to programmers who care a great deal about aesthetics and expressiveness of code.

rip7472• 13 years ago

so a week ago it was CFML and this week its Ruby. is there going to be any week that the languages i program in doesn't get bashed on the net ;)

ciferkey• 13 years ago

  To be relevant today, a programming language must provide simple yet powerful facilities for composition and collaboration. A language does not need general immutable state, purely pure functions, or complex type systems, no matter how inferred.

Is this a poke at Haskell?

dragonwriter4• 13 years ago

Is this a poke at Haskell?

Its saying that a language doesn't have to be Haskell to be relevant. If that's what you consider a "poke", then sure.

hugh4life• 13 years ago

While I find the project interesting, I see nothing about performance. I'd like to see a focus on performance using optional type annotations.

http://www.mirah.org

vlucas• 13 years ago

"Ruby is failing to help businesses engage customers. It is seen as inefficient and inferior to other languages."

This is pure bullshit. If your business is advertising a particular programming language in order to "engage customers", you are doing something terribly wrong (unless you're in a niche developer market). Your customer doesn't even care about the programming language your site is written in at all. All they want is business value. If the value of your software outweighs the cost, THAT is how you engage customers.

Ruby and other dynamic languages like Python and PHP will always have a place, no matter how they do or don't scale. The danger for 95% of startups is complete failure - not succeeding and not getting any traction at all, not "OMG how are we going to scale this with the hundreds of millions of pageviews we have?". A focus on rapid prototyping and productivity for a small team is exactly what most startups need, and Ruby/Rails is a great fit for that. It's not going anywhere, and it's certainly not going to die.

reillyse2• 13 years ago

what a load of rubbish.

I have seen absolutely no evidence that Ruby is dying or even ill.

This article provides absolutely no evidence but just makes a completely unsubstantiated claim.

Saying startups aren't bragging that they are using Ruby as proof that it is dead is pretty dumb. Sure Ruby isn't the hot new thing anymore, it's not as "cool" as it used to be and the people who always want to be trying the latest languages aren't experimenting with it and writing blogs about it. But it's very much alive and kicking, just much more mature and less sexy. Which is inevitable.

djhworld• 13 years ago

I'm not entirely sure what this is, is it a rewrite/syntax clean up of the existing ruby language that runs on the Rubinus VM?

rupert654• 13 years ago

I hate this phrase. It doesn't mean what people think it means and wouldn't make any sense if it did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

Introducing Rubinius X

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