[nextos]

I wish this had been available years ago!

I think Ruby was an excellent replacement for Lua to do ML, once Torch ran out of steam due to LuaJIT memory limitations. However, historically, MRI Ruby was slow and problematic.

Personally, I prefer Ruby to Python. Ruby is very close to Smalltalk, with some ideas from Perl and Lisp.

[aerovistae]

God do I love Ruby. It's just such a beautiful language. Feels more expressive and imaginative than any other language I've touched by a mile.

But while I personally enjoy it more than Python, Python will always be the one I would recommend to anyone for work or learning-- it's so much more straightforward and predictable. The "one right way to do things" mentality that pervades python makes things so consistent and intuitive. Ruby, on the other hand, gives you 10+ ways to form a loop. The paradox of choice and all.

[ibraheemdev]

In the words of David Heinemeier Hansson:

> In fact, Ruby, to me, so much of the enjoyment in Ruby is these incredible subtleties, of how many different ways you can structure a conditional. Like, Ruby has, I don't know even the count, there's gotta be 60 different ways you can say `if something`, right? And it is in those 60 different ways that I find half the enjoyment of writing Ruby. Like, it was one of those things where I knew, very early on, that Python was not a language for me because it said, right in the manifesto, there should be preferably one and only one way to do things. Ruby has the exact opposite approach, there should be preferably ten thousand subtle different ways of doing things, that will allow you to write that particular conditional, with just the right emphasis, do you write it in the front, do you put it at the back, is it multi-line, is it single line? Like, there's so much variety and it's in that variety that I find poetry. And it is the poetry of writing Ruby code, of making those subtle distinctions where, at the end, you can like, "Ehh, should we move it around" like, where I just go like, giggles, right? Like, this where like we talked about that big smile, right? So much of that big smile comes from, not just like solving the problem, but solving it in a poetic way.

[mercer]

I respect that perspective. I both love and often avoid Ruby precisely because of this. But even if I don't use Ruby much day to day, I really appreciate what it taught me (Rails, too) and the fun I had writing it.

[aerovistae]

And I love Ruby for exactly that reason. Well said, totally agreed.

[norswap]

Ruby doesn't have to be slow anymore!

https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-b...

https://speakerdeck.com/eregon/running-rack-and-rails-faster...

[chubot]

Hm interesting, for anyone interested, LuaJIT has a 2 GiB limit, which is unsurprisingly problematic for machine learning:

https://kvitajakub.github.io/2016/03/08/luajit-memory-limita...

https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn/issues/80

[fsfod]

The 2gb limit has been fixed for a many years now with the GC64 mode that was set to the default build mode last year.

[cplanas]

> MRI Ruby was slow and problematic.

Why problematic?

On the slowness, I would agree that Ruby is slower than many languages, but as an interpreted language this is -up to a certain point- by design, or at least an accepted part of the trade-off one accepts when he takes a programming language. Moreover, Ruby's natural competitor is Python, not -say- Clojure; and I wouldn't that Ruby is significantly slower than Python.

[nextos]

It had lots of memory leaks. I love Ruby, and I used it anyway, but this bothered me a lot back in the mid-to-late 2000s.

[mperham]

The ever present memory bloat with Ruby has been discovered to be a glibc issue. Jemalloc makes MRI memory usage much more predictable and stable.

[jaggederest]

It's gotten a lot better since then, but so have all the other languages! I still love Ruby but I would use Python for ML in a heartbeat.

[zeku]

I work with Ruby, Python, and R daily.

I use Ruby for everything I can, Python for ML, and R for data analysis. I just find it easier to not swim upstream and force ruby onto all of those contexts when the other 2 languages have loads of inertia behind them in those spaces. It's unfortunate.