Is Ruby Dying? 400
New submitter John Moses writes "I have been working with node.js a lot lately, and have been discussing with co-workers if node.js is taking steam away from Ruby at all. I think the popularity of the language is an important talking point when selecting a language and framework for a new project. A graph on the release date of gems over time could help determine an answer. The front page of RubyGems only shows data on the most popular, but I am really interested in seeing recent activity. My theory is that if developers' contributions to different gems is slowing down, then so is the popularity of the language."
Short answer: no (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Silly programmer, you're not an "coder"! You don't know what's cool and what's not. Look at that UID. You must be like, 35! Yuck, old people!
Re: (Score:3)
Oops... meant "a coder". I was going to put "an app developer" but changed my mind at the last minute...and forgot to fix the "an".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Don't worry about it, QA will catch it before it goes to production. That's the new world of development. Write your code as horribly as you want, someone will fix it later.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Short answer: no (Score:5, Funny)
Look at that UID. You must be like, 35! Yuck, old people!
Careful there, kid. :)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwww dirty old man!
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Wish the kids would get off my /.
Re: (Score:3)
I kind of miss the hot grits and petrified Natalie Portman. Kind of. I also miss chicken pox.
Re:Finally got it (Score:4, Funny)
Hmmm. 46 here. And apparently still too fast for Slashdot who tells me to "Slow down, cowboy!"
Re: (Score:2)
I'm so old I used to program a computer with core memory. 64kx16 of core memory. FWIW, Node isn't better than Ruby, but it is in some sense more convenient, in that you only need to be immediately fluent in one programming language. But if I had my druthers, I'd go back to using scheme, just like we used to back in the days of the Old Republic [xkcd.com]. There's just no point in bragging about the programming language you're using if it's got two different ways of ending a sentence.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm 53 - but was relatively late to the party (and I've tended to have younger coworkers, one of whom introduced me to /. a decade or so ago).
I suspect any age to UID correlation has a pretty large sigma. I wouldn't be surprised if the four and five digit UIDs demonstrate a big cluster of people who are now between 30 and 40, though.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm 35 since a couple of months back
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
" Look at that UID. You must be like, 35! Yuck, old people!"
I must be ancient.
Don't worry, fiver, you aren't.
Re: Short answer: no (Score:3)
Nice to meet you fellow 4...
Re: (Score:2)
400k get off my elawn :)
Re: (Score:2)
Nice graph. You'll have better luck with 'javascript' than 'java script' though.
Re:Short answer: no (Score:4, Insightful)
How about picking the best tool for the job, rather than holding a popularity contest? Too old-fashioned?
It's good to avoid going too far off into the weeds, lest you find it impossible to hire someone to support code in some pet language, but that's not the concern here. Of the universe of languages, both mainstream and niche languages commonly used in your niche, pick the one that makes it easiest to develop and support the features in front of you.
It's pretty obvious someone is playing "what language will look best on my resume" here, and if playing that game is obvious to me from this distance, it will be glaring to hiring managers. Few people are looking for a history of "trendy" (you'd be amazed how fast "trendy" becomes "sad" in tech), while a history of doing the dirty, unpopular, work that keeps development teams productive is always welcome, long after the tech stack fades into obsolescence.
Re:Short answer: no (Score:4)
How about picking the best tool for the job, rather than holding a popularity contest? Too old-fashioned?
It's good to avoid going too far off into the weeds, lest you find it impossible to hire someone to support code in some pet language, but that's not the concern here. Of the universe of languages, both mainstream and niche languages commonly used in your niche, pick the one that makes it easiest to develop and support the features in front of you.
It's pretty obvious someone is playing "what language will look best on my resume" here, and if playing that game is obvious to me from this distance, it will be glaring to hiring managers. Few people are looking for a history of "trendy" (you'd be amazed how fast "trendy" becomes "sad" in tech), while a history of doing the dirty, unpopular, work that keeps development teams productive is always welcome, long after the tech stack fades into obsolescence.
All these pseudo-languages look bad to me when I review resume's. If you want to impress, learn C, C++, Assembler, or a few other real languages. Ruby, C$, VB, Python etc... those can be picked up on the fly if needed.
Re:Short answer: no (Score:5, Insightful)
Learn C. Almost everything else draws from it. Learn C, and you're half-way to learning anything else.
Re:Short answer: no (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with it is that if you learn C as first language, you probably will always write C in any language. With all the ugly hacks and trying to reinvent the wheel time and time again.
I write in C for a living, but frankly, while I love my job, I don't like the language. It is just a bit more high level than a macro assembler and full of crazy behaviour.
Re: (Score:2)
Quite true. Should see some of my early perl code - it worked, but there were a lot of basic perl common-sense methods I didn't know.
I only program things as a hobby though, I'm not a professional. Most complicated thing I've written in perl is an IRC bot for a roleplay channel that handles character descriptions, logging and dice rolling.
Re: (Score:2)
C worries me these days, unless balanced with something modern, because the coding style that comes with good, maintainable C is entirely the wrong style in any modern language. C proves you understand pointers, and that's great don't get me wrong, but these days you had better be comfortable with exceptions too, because I'm beyond tired of seeing Pokemon code (gotta catch em all!).
Re:Short answer: no (Score:5, Informative)
the compiler is free to rearrange the order of the fields as it sees fit.
No, it is not. ISO/IEC 9899:1999, 6.7.2.1 "Structure and union specifiers", paragraph 13:
"Within a structure object, the non-bit-field members and the units in which bit-fields reside have addresses that increase in the order in which they are declared. A pointer to a structure object, suitably converted, points to its initial member (or if that member is a bit-field, then to the unit in which it resides), and vice versa. There may be unnamed padding within a structure object, but not at its beginning."
The C++ standard has a similar provision. What's unspecified is whether there is any padding between the fields.
Re:Short answer: no (Score:4)
Oh, one other thing that's different in C++: the relative order of fields in a struct/class in different visibility blocks is unspecified. So, for example, in this one the fields must be ordered:
Whereas in this one, x and y must be ordered exactly as specified, but z may precede or follow them:
Re: (Score:3)
Global variables aren't structure members.
Local variables aren't structure members.
You cannot correct mistakes about structure members in C by making statements about C++, global variables, or local variables.
And quite why you've assumed there's a stack for local variables I don't know - there's no mention of local variables being on a "stack" in the C standard. Architectures which didn't use a stack for local variables never had stack overflows, there was much to be said for them.
I do not feel
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on the job.
If you're going in for a web development shop, C, C++, LISP, and ASM are just potential signs that we're wasting the applicants time, or they're wasting ours.
I mean, granted if you're looking for someone who can help handle billions upon billions of transactions per second, having someone who knows their way around with a real language is handy.
Re: (Score:3)
> How about picking the best tool for the job, rather than holding a popularity contest? Too old-fashioned?
How do you judge best tool for the job? That isn't an objective question. How would I know if Ruby is the right tool for me?
The more useful question is "what does the tool offer" and Ruby doesn't have much going for it. If you are using a tool that uses Ruby (like Gherkin), you have a compelling reason to use Ruby. The cost tradeoffs, for integrating one of the many equivalent languages, usually res
Re:Short answer: no (Score:5, Interesting)
I got hired at both my current and previous jobs with no expertise in the languages used, and paid quite well. Experience with the problem domain, and with doing the dirty jobs senior devs volunteers for (because dammit we can't keep working this way) is what matters. In my experience, it's only really the bottom-feeder companies that are looking for a very specific tech stack instead of "smart enough to come up to speed;" the kind of places you work when you're desperate for anything, not what you want to steer towards!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting that even though PHP's interest has declined over time (according to the same chart [google.com]), it's still more popular than Python & Ruby combined.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It probably doesn't. It probably has to do with Drupal.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Very true, but I suspect the reason behind this phenomenon is that people who use Wordpress are looking for something they don't _have_ to program.
Re:Short answer: no (Score:5, Informative)
Nice try (intentionally spelling "java script" is not cute, dude!).
Here, I fixed it to you [google.com].
Not a surprise, anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. Still, I would not have guessed javascript would be in (apparent) decline. Sorry already blew my mod points here.
Re: (Score:2)
As a big fan of Ruby generally, I hate to take this side, but Ruby is definitely no longer for the 'cool' kids and the community has been shrinking a bit for a while now.
Your Google query chart is a bit wonky as it captures all sorts of oddities. Here [google.com] is a revised chart which only looks at Computer + Electronics related searches using Google's categories for everything except Python, which I can't seem to figure out how to get it to appear.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think necessarily that's the right metric for figuring out whether or not a language is dead.
It's very much a fuzzy, qualitative problem.
My best metric is, "Can you still get a job using this language? and is the work interesting?"
Re: (Score:2)
Hence the other half of that question.
"Is this work interesting?"
Prime Sense does all of their work(did?) in Perl and they just got snapped up by Apple. I think Instagram's a Ruby shop too.
Lots of shops are still doing amazing and interesting work in PHP and Python. And Ruby for that matter.
I think we're soon reaching a language golden age where language won't matter like it used to. Maybe some day we'll be at a place where interpreter won't matter either. But I think that kind of dream universal web develo
Wrong. We in industry are very upset with Ruby. (Score:5, Interesting)
Those of us in industry are very fed up with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but I think it's much more because of their communities than it is because of the technologies themselves.
I don't know if there's a polite way of saying this, but far too many of the people involved with those communities are utter disasters who in turn create utterly disastrous software systems. For every Ruby success story we may hear about, there are probably 10 or 20 total disasters that aren't as widely known. The disasters are usually because of the people involved, not the technologies.
Those of us who've been in the industry for many years, if not decades, and have had to engage in hiring over the past 8 or so years will know what I'm talking about. We have to deal with candidates who have no formal education at all in computer science, software engineering, or a related field. They don't even have the equivalent of a single four-month community college programming course. If we're lucky, they've read a single book about web development using Ruby on Rails. (This is ignoring their other serious flaws, such as the complete inability to dress or act with even a minimal level of professionalism; I've interviewed some of these hipsters while they're wearing t-shirts with dumbass sayings on them, and fedora hats.)
Now, having been in the industry for years, I can see right through these people. When they get past HR, they don't get past me. But I can't be everywhere. I've worked with a few organizations lately where the people making the hiring or purchasing decisions in the past didn't know better, and now these organizations have ended up with their very own Ruby on Rails disasters.
The Ruby community may not realize it, but they're getting a very bad reputation in the industry. It's nearly as bad as the reputation that the PHP and JavaScript communities have now. But this is exactly what's expected to happen when dealing with programmers who do shitty work in the first place, or who think it's perfectly normal to write unmaintainable code, or who think it's acceptable to job hop 3 or 4 times a year, or who can't work in a professional manner, or who deliver one under-performing and costly software disaster after another.
At more and more places, "Ruby" and "Ruby on Rails" are becoming synonyms for "costly disaster". That's not the kind of reputation that a programming language or a web framework can have if it wants to survive and flourish past the short term. Maybe the people in these communities don't realize it, but they're losing trust at an alarming pace.
Re: (Score:2)
His point is that certain tools attract bad programmers, because of the peculiarities of the culture that is formed around those tools. It doesn't mean that the tool itself is bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Some graphs from google trends: ruby programming [google.com], python programming [google.com] and php programming [google.com]. Which one of these things is not like the others? (Hint: Python).
TIOBE data [tiobe.com], questionable as it is.
Search for jobs at LinkedIn:
Ruby: 112 results
Python: 5,151 results
PHP: 3,046 results
And the "programmer perception" survey [berkeley.edu] Berkeley did a while back (that I think was covered at Slashdot). Check out the results for
Re: (Score:2)
TIOBE is not a particularly good metric, IMO. PyPL [google.com] (which counts search results for "X tutorial") is a better indicator of which language is popular to learn today (which, quite obviously, translates to its popularity in short term).
Re: (Score:3)
1. Google trend data for perl programming [google.com]. That certainly doesn't bear out the assertion that perl's where its at. In fact, it looks more like the trend line for Ruby and PHP. Which is to say asymptotically approaching zero.
2. TIOBE. Perl doesn't fare very well here either, ranking 12th in Dec. 2013 after having ranked 9th in Dec. 2012. Python is stead at 8th. PHP is steady at 6th. Ruby looks more like perl
Re: (Score:2)
Ruby is standing stronger than ever [google.com].
By this metric Java [google.com] is still kicking everyone's butts. Also... *all* programming languages are "dying".
I've been around the block enough times to know that if you want to survive as a programmer you had better damn well learn to program. And not in just one language, you need to know a survey of language types. Ruby is just one type in the same category as Python and Javascript. If you really want to survive 20 years as a programmer (like I did) you need to branch out more.
Now, you kids get off my lawn.
Re: (Score:2)
are you sure those people aren't searching for jewels or JFK assassin killers?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would wager the amount of google queries only shows how many "questions" you have. ;D
Which leas to the question if Ruby is indeed such an easy language everyone claims
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Long answer: a better indicator is how many Google queries for the respective languages are issued. And those suggest that Ruby is standing stronger than ever [google.com]. Ruby is more than just Rails. And just because there is yet another web apps framework, it doesn't mean that the other ones automatically lose traction.
The Google trends supplied in your link used generic search terms, seriously skewing the results inaccurately about programming languages. Stuff about reptiles, famous comedy acts and things such as an infamous Italian scandal (and whatever else) were being included. By replacing the display with terms specific to programming, this version showing trends for searches about programming languages in Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Java and Nodejs [google.com] should show something a little more meaningful.
Since the summary is mo
Netcraft Confirms It (Score:5, Funny)
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Ruby is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Ruby community when IDC confirmed that Ruby market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all languages. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Ruby has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Ruby is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent programmers survey.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Ruby's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Ruby faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Ruby because Ruby is dying. Things are looking very bad for Ruby. As many of us are already aware, Ruby continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
not dying in DevOps (Score:5, Insightful)
Contributions also slow down with maturity (Score:3)
Now people can spend much more time actually writing applications than writing supporting infrastructure.
Re: (Score:3)
I think that's as bad of an oversimplification as the original thesis. But it certainly raises an important issue the submitter seems to be ignoring. For a highly modularized system, a lack of contributions to particular modules may well simply indicate that those modules are mature and don't need a lot of additional contributions any more. To really get a feel for the health of the overall ecosystem, you have to take a broader view.
But Node.JS IS WEBSCALE (Score:5, Funny)
Node.js invents threading/processes and is webscale [youtube.com].
The best part is once you start coding it you will find yourself with a neat trimmed beard in designer plaid in a hip coffee shop listening to music not even out yet with 2 georgous ladies by your side giggling and being turned on by your most awesome code that is on your laptop screen.
Re: (Score:2)
with 2 georgous ladies
Does that mean two "ladies" both named "george" who are presumed to be into cross dressing? No, thanks.
Re:But Node.JS IS WEBSCALE (Score:4, Interesting)
But it's web scale.
The event/callback/state machine model is a pain to program in, but at least you don't have race conditions on shared data. Also, now that most Javascript programmers are aware that the language supports closures, callbacks aren't so hard to code properly.
The classic problem with threads is that the usual locking primitives (which are almost always variants on the POSIX primitives) are treated as an OS object, rather than part of the language. For most languages, the language has no idea of which locks lock what data. Ada gets this right, but the Ada rendezvous is clunky. Even Go gets this wrong. (See the endless discussions of "is this a race condition?" in the Go newsgroup.) So race conditions are common in threaded software, and a cause of random failures.
Practical problems with threads include crappy implementations of lock primitives that make a system call even in the non-blocking case, the cost of fencing on superscalar CPUs, and poor scheduler coordination between context switching and message passing.
Most of those issues are way too theoretical for the average web programmer. It's better that they not have to think about them. There's a lot of web code to be written and we don't want to waste the good people on it.
Dying? No. (Score:2)
Ruby as a language is progressing well and Ruby 2.1 will be out soon.
Ruby gems is still active.
Just because it's not getting all the buzz from the young kids doesn't mean it's dying.
Re: (Score:2)
Just because it's not getting all the buzz from the young kids doesn't mean it's dying.
Ruby is not C. Ruby was born amidst a slew of toy languages, getting all the buzz from the young kids. Once that buzz died down, and the kids moved on to newer fad languages, and without a generation of seasoned programmers extolling its virtues, Ruby died.
Ruby isn't dying. It's already dead.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Perl is still used in sysadmin, however Ruby is gaining ground at Perl's expense in this area.
Python is being used in science by the new post docs, but fortran, matlab, and IDL still reign supreme. (I like python because it's way cheaper than IDL or Matlab). Perl actually has a larger share of science use than Python. Python is replacing Perl as a glue language for science with Fortran and C still do the heavy lifting.
Ruby is also being used in science. Ruby + R when plotting is required, otherwise Ruby (
Re: (Score:2)
that's funny, you think your little part of the world is the whole?
Ruby is quite popular in asia, used in huge projects.
Re: (Score:2)
"It is because of you, motherfucker, that we are not using LISP."
Win.
Node.js (Score:5, Interesting)
We had to swallow a dagger and use JavaScript on the client as it is the only game in town. Please someone, enlighten me, why would I use this horrific language on the server side? What exactly am I missing? What is so great about Node.js that warrants having to deal with JS.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What's great about Node.js is that it doesn't warrant hiring actual programmers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
lol, like you don't do that for C#? The language does not make the programmer.
Re:He's not "conceited". He's absolutely correct! (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad language or not, it is already used heavily on the client-side. Using it server-side allows you to make use of the same objects without having to maintain things like validation logic in two languages. It also means that if you are using Karma or something similar for testing that you only need one testing framework. Otherwise you'd need two testing frameworks running. Switching gears from one language to the next isn't hard but going from strongly typed to dynamic often results in developers trying to strongly type their javascript or writing it in such a way that it becomes too rigid. Tests should be governing everything anyways, especially if it is TDD.
My company is using C# on the back-end and javascript on the front. I write php+javascript at home though (and have experienced a life-time of derision from "professional" developers for it). I still write C/C++ for linux and embedded projects. Too many developers have decided their language is the best and everything else is horrible. When really, every language is covered in warts. Every language has (had) growing pains. Have you ever wondered why if your language is the best it is rarely used in all situations? That's because it's not the best tool for every job.
Your kind is nothing new. Anyone who has a passion for programming runs into people with your attitude and just shrugs. It is almost like dealing with a form of bigotry.
Re: (Score:2)
Its development tools are a decade or more behind those of Java and C++.
It's worse than just being behind. Behind is a solvable problem. Basic IDE features like auto-completion/typo checking are impossible for the IDE when the content of an object can't be known until run-time. Consider a simple example that uses a random number to either define a given property on an object or not - the IDE fundamentally cannot know whether than property should show up in its autocomplete list. So I think the poor qual
Re: (Score:2)
Well, for one, you can have the same single-threading benefits you have in the browser, now on the server! Cooperative multitasking like in the old days! It will make you forget what threads were invented for in the first place!
Re:Node.js (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Naturally asynchronous, NodeJS allows vastly more I/O than a similar threaded solution. Need to implement long polling for 2,000 concurrent users? Not a problem.
2. The ability to share libraries and other code effortlessly between server-side and client-side applications.
Some of the down sides to NodeJS are that, well... it uses JavaScript. Seriously, though, it could be worse: it could be PHP. JavaScript really isn't that bad, once you actually learn the language. I hated it until fairly recently because I didn't really understand it. Now that I've spent some time learning its intricacies and quirks, I am much more productive with it. I can even enjoy using it. Would I prefer using Python? Absolutely. But it's really not so bad.
Moving forward though, I think one of the biggest problem with JavaScript in general is that we have far too many people who know just enough JavaScript to be dangerous that trying to establish high community standards will be very, very hard. In fact, one of the reasons I like Python so much is not that Python itself is all that great (it, too, has issues), but rather that there are countless excellent, well maintained, well designed libraries available. The same is simply not true for JavaScript in general.
Re: (Score:2)
And it's not a problem in any other decent server side language either. Async/Completion Ports for .NET, NIO/Mina/Grizzly/etc for Java.
I'm struggling to understand why you'd ever want this (assuming a web application, which is a fair assumption
Re: (Score:3)
And it's not a problem in any other decent server side language either. Async/Completion Ports for .NET, NIO/Mina/Grizzly/etc for Java.
But it is in Ruby, to my knowledge. And many other higher-level languages.
I'm struggling to understand why you'd ever want this (assuming a web application, which is a fair assumption as you're talking about JS). Your business logic lives on the server, your presentation logic on the client - and never the twain shall meet. The only thing I can really think about is data type definitions, but JSON does a good job of simplifying that (and something like GSON will deal with the conversions). Now I have wanted to share code between server and client in a rich client application, but in that case I could build both sides in either .NET or Java and be perfectly happy.
Yeah I'm mostly thinking pseudo classes and things like that. Say, a custom date/time library, etc.
Re:Node.js (Score:4, Informative)
No, more like: http://pastie.org/private/ij3rdcgtkgteefgwj57mfg [pastie.org]
I realize that's just an example of simple inheritance, but not bad for using nothing more than functions and prototypes. Yes, it's a little verbose. You can also do prototypal inheritance, etc. The point is that with just a couple of constructs, JavaScript can do things that most languages must separate into many more statements, expressions, etc. But to clarify, I am *not* saying JavaScript is awesome; it clearly has limitations. But it is pretty amazing what all can be done with such a simple language. It is misunderstood.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
We had to swallow a dagger and use JavaScript on the client as it is the only game in town. Please someone, enlighten me, why would I use this horrific language on the server side? What exactly am I missing? What is so great about Node.js that warrants having to deal with JS.
Because web developers think they invented threading [youtube.com]. They like node.js because they can do block/non block I/O and asynchronize programing and can write something hip called events to manage them with a new technology called a scheduler.
Re: (Score:2)
You paint with a very wide brush. Front-end development is still relatively new. Anyone who has been developing for a decade IS a back-end developer. If you have been keeping with the times then it means you started doing more and more front-end work (aka Javascript). Now there is so much on the front-end that it actually has to be organized properly and cared for. Javascript is no longer just a copy & paste language. Bad developers write bad code. The language is immaterial.
Obligatory: She's dead, Jim. (Score:5, Funny)
Damit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a developer in a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language that supports multiple programming paradigms, including functional, object oriented, and imperative.
Thank you, Wikipedia.
Short answer: yes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Trends always die.
All-purpose languages that adapt over time are better tools to learn.
You learn more in depth, instead of having certain tasks be very easy.
This is similar to the trade off between wizard-based interfaces and actually knowing what you're doing with an operating system.
Re: (Score:3)
It amazes me the utility and run I've gotten out of learning C and C++.. decades go.
We don't need you, Ruby! (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean it has ever been alive? (Score:2)
Clearly I am not in "the web world" and I am seeing this question from an external viewpoint. But I never really saw anybody exciting about ruby or using ruby or praising ruby except one single phd student who was using it to make his experiments repeatable and automatically logged. Sure there is an occasional article on a new version of ruby, a flaw in ruby-on-rails. I heard people talk a lot about PHP, about Python, about javascript, to do pretty much anything. But quite frankly I never hear about ruby. A
Re: (Score:2)
It must be your scope of work that you haven't heard of it as a option for a given project, or that no one uses it.
I'm often put in the architect position, or at least, the seat right next to them, and Ruby has frequently been brought up as a contender. It's not being brought up because it's especially good, but rather, it's evangelists, while small in number, tend to be loud in voice. It's what I call a 'toy language', in that it's fun to play with, and the kids especially seem to like it, but very few p
So in other words, Ruby is running off the rails? (Score:5, Funny)
The real question is: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Has Ruby really been alive?
Re: (Score:3)
The cool kids are using Go for their server apps and infrastructure projects.
While their parents are taking real jobs and paying the bills!
Re: (Score:2)
The cool kids are using Go for their server apps and infrastructure projects.
While their parents are taking real jobs and paying the bills!
Sadly, those kids are hired and keep chasing the latest and greatest (including jobs) and leave their one trick pony app behind that was written in "the next big thing" language with no knowledge transfer or support.
Re:Nope (title capitalization sucks, btw) (Score:4, Informative)
No. Next question, is Slashdot dying?
Slashdot will be dead as soon as the new "design" comes out.
It is... (Score:2)
(i.e. Slashdot is) - as far as content and quality are concerned. Look at my UID, I've known the site since the beginning. These days I don't really know why I still come here, reddit has MUCH better comment quality on average (not a joke - this includes that the really good comments are easy to spot while the garbage quickly disappears). Slashdot is living off of past glory completely. Back then the moderation system was state the greatest asset - today it's still the same while everyone else continued to
Re: (Score:3)
You're the guy who told me to get off his lawn when I first joined, aren't you?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No. Next question, is Slashdot dying?
Slashdot was reported as dying [discovery.com] back in 2011.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For quick and dirty scripts, you can just define your methods and variables and not deal with classes. They're added to the main object, much like javascript globals and functions are added to the window object.
Re: (Score:3)
No you do not need to place a function in a class.
irb :001 > def add5(x)
:002?> x + 5;
:003 > end
:004 > add5(10)
:005 > add5(12)
2.0.0-p353
2.0.0-p353
2.0.0-p353
=> nil
2.0.0-p353
=> 15
2.0.0-p353
=> 17
Re: (Score:3)
You're wrong. While it's true that "everything is an object" in Ruby, a lot of it is implicit. E.g. you can define "global" functions - they just end up as methods of Object. And because Object is a base class of any other class, you can call those methods directly in any piece of code. So it's OO, but you can completely ignore it if you want.
"Everything is an object" in Python, too, by the way. Global functions there become methods on the module object for the module in which they are declared.
All in all,
Re: (Score:2)