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by the_gastropod
901 days ago
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Fine analogy. Plenty of people liked the Sega Genesis more than the SNES. (I think a more apt analogy is more contemporary consoles, where the lowly-spec’d Nintendo competes just fine against the competition’s higher performance units. People like Nintendo for reasons other than the spec sheet.) I enjoy writing Ruby a heck of a lot more than I do writing JavaScript. I like the object model. I like Ruby’s standard library. I like the Ruby community. I like the tooling: irb is fantastic. Bundler is still one of the best package managers around—makes npm and yarn look silly by comparison. The spec sheet just does not matter for virtually any of my work. Switching to a less enjoyable, more performant, language might make a 60ms response time average become 55ms. Who cares? That performance difference was even bigger 15 years ago, and it didn’t matter then. It matters less today. GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Netflix (yes! Even Netflix!), Soundcloud, Kickstarter, etc. etc. all use Ruby today. It is a fantastic development environment when you’re more concerned with doing your job, and less concerned with performance pissing contests. |
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We're talking about performance because of the context, which is – there aren't the jobs to support the language's continued growth and dedication. We're talking about speed because there needs to be a defining reason to continue using a language and develop in an ecosystem that isn't moving at the growth of other communities.
If Nintendo Switch had 4 games, and they all looked like dog piss - asking why would I bother wasting time with Switch is a valid opinion.
There's also this insect-minded logic of only being a "front end developer" or "back end developer", and that mindset is furthered by languages that don't bother speaking the language of the web. If I learn javascript, I can be both - pretty much on day 1. If I learn Ruby and Javascript, great. How easy is that to do for a junior developer just getting out of school? Not widely.