Do I not like Ruby anymore? (2024)

Back when autocompletion and stuff were only available in Visual Studio/Xcode/Other bug IDEs, I was forced to use Ruby and fell in love with it. It didn't matter what I used as my editor was Sublime. But when VSCode came and language features became democratized, I never touched a type-less language again. Why should someone opt for a language with absolutely no features where one can have autocompletion, typechecking, deep data type exploration, jumping to definitions and implementations? I really think it's a bad choice of Ruby not to care for types. And well we now have Crystal which again makes me question why Ruby? And it’s a shame no language is as beautiful as Ruby, not in features choices, design elegance, balance, beauty of the syntax, joy of programming mindset, not even in the name and logo. I wished Matz rethinked this part.

I fully agree to the points here, even as a full time ruby lover. Jumping around different languages over the past 10 years really shows staleness in Ruby as a language, even if the ecosystem tries to keep up.

The ergonomics of ruby still have me very much liking the language as it fits how I think, but there are a lot of good developments in the usual neighbors, and I see myself picking up both Python and JS ever more for small projects.

This post reminds me of something.

During my first Introduction to Programming course at university, I was taught Java. One thing that I found very troubling is that it wasn't easy, or possible in many cases, to change the programming language. Sure, you can write new functions or methods or classes, but I can't change the keyword for an if-statement. I also remember the TA saying "why would you want that?" I caught myself thinking "if we can program a computer, then why can't we program a language?"

15 years later, I still have this issue a bit, except I made my peace with it. It is what it is. There are some exceptions though! Such as: Lisp, Smalltalk and similar languages. It's in part why I have worked for a company that professionally programmed in Pharo (a Smalltalk descendant [2]). I remember hacking a very crude way for runtime type checking in Pharo [1], just for fun.

I'm not a Ruby programmer, all I know is that Ruby has some things that are identical to Smalltalk. But my question to the author would be: if you long for things like keyword arguments, type hints and namespaces why don't you program it in the Ruby language yourself?

Or is that really hard, like most other languages?

[1] https://youtu.be/FeFrt-kdvms?si=vlFPIkGuVceztVuW&t=2678

[2] Fun fact, I learned about Lisp, Smalltalk and Pharo through HN! So I know most of you know but I suspect some don't.

    #define BEGIN {
    #define END }

I feel the samw, happy that Python is improving and getting more good tooling

I'm sort of the inverse of this author: I have always liked Python and disliked Ruby. It's true though that python has changed a lot, and it's a mixed bag IMHO. I think every language feature python has added can have a reasonable argument made for its existence, however collectively it kind of makes the language burgeon under the weight of its own complexity. "one way to do it" really hasn't been a hard goal for the language for a while.

I'm really charmed by ML style languages nowadays. I think python has built a lot of kludges to compensate for the fact that functions, assignments, loops, and conditionals are not expressions. You get comprehensions, lambdas, conditional expressions, the walrus operator... most statements have an expression equivalent now.

it seems like, initially, Guido was of the opinion that in most cases you should just write the statement and not try "to cram everything in-line," so to speak. However it can't be denied that there are cases where the in-line version just looks nice. On the other hand now you have a statement and an expression that is slightly different syntactically but equivalent semantically, and you have to learn both. Rust avoids this nicely by just making everything an expression, but you do get some semicolon-related awkwardness as a result.

It's the never ending "end"s that bother me about Ruby.

    class Mess
    def chaos(x)
        if x > 0
        [1,2,3].each do |i|
            case i
            when 1
            if i.odd?
                puts "odd"
            else
                puts "even"
            end
            when 2
            begin
                puts "trying"
            rescue
                puts "failed"
            end
            else
            puts "other"
            end
        end
        else
        puts "negative"
        end
    end
    end

Clear away all those ends and the program logic pops out. Much fresher!

    class Mess:
        def chaos(self, x):
            if x > 0:
                for i in [1, 2, 3]:
                    match i:
                        case 1:
                            if i % 2 == 1:
                                print("odd")
                            else:
                                print("even")
                        case 2:
                            try:
                                print("trying")
                            except:
                                print("failed")
                        case _:
                            print("other")
            else:
                print("negative")

    class Mess
      def chaos(x)
        if x > 0
          [1, 2, 3].each do |i|
            case i
            when 1
              if i.odd?
                puts "odd"
              else
                puts "even"
              end
            when 2
              begin
                puts "trying"
              rescue
                puts "failed"
              end
            else
              puts "other"
            end
          end
        else
          puts "negative"
        end
      end
    end

    class Mess
      def chaos(x)
        if x > 0
          [1, 2, 3].each do |i|
            case i
            when 1
              puts i.odd? ? "odd" : "even"
            when 2
              puts "trying"
            else
              puts "other"
            end
          end
        else
          puts "negative"
        end
      end
    end

    class Mess
      def chaos(x)
        return puts "negative" unless x > 0
    
        [1, 2, 3].each { |i| handle_item(i) }
      end

      private
      def handle_item(i)
        case i
        when 1 then puts(i.odd? ? "odd" : "even")
        when 2 then puts "trying"
        else        puts "other"
        end
      end
    end

What looks like stagnation to Steen is actually [1] Matz’s remarkable foresight that provided stability and developer happiness.

Steen’s not wrong that Python evolved and Ruby moved slower, but he’s wrong to call Ruby stagnant or irrelevant. Just think what we've enjoyed in recent times: YJIT and MJIT massively improved runtime performance, ractors, the various type system efforts (RBS/Sorbet etc) that give gradual typing without cluttering the language etc.

Ruby’s priorities (ergonomics, DSLs, stability) are different[2] from Python’s (standardisation, academia/data). It’s a matter of taste and domain, not superiority.

[1] I'm stealing a point DHH made on Lex's podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ

[2] I'm once again parroting DHH/Matz

Likes Lisp Ruby and Typescript, interesting tastes (in a good way... nuanced)

I still like Ruby. 15+ years in, I find myself in the camp of not wanting it to change. 25 year old me would have been totally jazzed about the addition of namespaces in Ruby 3.5/4.0. 40 year old me wants namespaces to get off my Ruby lawn.

  Foo.new.foo #=> "bar"

I was a full-time Rubyist for a long time. I started the UK's first dedicated Ruby on Rails consultancy in 2006 before Rails was even v1.0 (IIRC the first apps I shipped back then were 0.8.6). I stuck around through the hype chain, and then started to help one employer break up a RoR monolith into micro services and adopt Java and Go (this was a mistake - we should have crafted the monolith better). I've built 4 startups as hands-on CTO with Ruby and Rails. It fed and housed me for many years.

In the last 5-7 years I've had to go in other directions. Clojure, Python, Java, even back to C and taking a look at Rust and Zig. I'm now in a role where I don't code so much, but I can see Ruby's problems - performance, the surprises, the fact it allows idiots to do idiotic things (nobody under the age of 40 should be legally allowed to monkey patch a base class or engage in meta programming).

And yet when I want to do something for me, for fun, perhaps advent of code, or a quick mock-up of something that's rolling around in my head, I reach for Ruby. Not elixir which has better runtimes, or C or Zig or Rust which has better performance, not something statically typed which leads to fewer bugs, not Python which has a huge data science community to it...

A few weeks ago I was listening to the DHH episode of the Lex Fridman podcast [0], where DHH talks about Ruby as a "luxury programming language". This matches my own experience.

When I need something to be fast, it's either because I'm dealing with a low-latency problem (and some of my side projects are very latency sensitive - 5ms can make the difference between success and failure), or because I can't afford the luxury of Ruby and Rails and the developer ergonomics.

Ruby makes things fun for the programmer. That's the point. It's beautiful to work with, even if it doesn't do all the things that all the coding books and blogs insist I should be ashamed to not have in my language.

I was slightly embarrassed to be a Ruby and RoR advocate for a while because of the brogrammer BS that emerged around both ecosystems in the 2010s. I then became very embarrassed because it wasn't as cool as a systems language like Rust or Go, or as intellectually deep as Haskell, or as hot on the ML bandwagon as Python.

But I think I don't care anymore. I'm just going to accept it for what it is, and lean into. Life's too short for "shoulds" - I'm just going to like what I like. And I like Ruby.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ