[__s]

I've worked with Ruby. It was a delight. But it has to be maintained, dynamic typing loses upfront safety & allows for a mess where you have to analyse the whole program to have any idea what some function is expected to take in & put out

I'm glad static typing came back

[throwanem]

Ruby is a fine toy and an awful tool, the other Perl that Python killed.

Rails should have incurred some kind of criminal indictment.

I wish I hadn't mentioned either, because now no one will talk about anything else.

[sidewndr46]

Analyze the whole program? I steadfastly refused to ever attempt do that. "method(:foo).source_location" from the Rails console and I've got the only answer that matters. Most functions were monkey patched at least once anyways, so you'd never know by searching for the implementation where it was.

[zbentley]

But like…this is very telling, no? If major conventions in a language involve runtime debugging/printing actions to just find out where a method is defined (and your approach here is the norm in every Ruby codebase I’ve worked on; this isn’t an attack on you in the slightest) that doesn’t say anything good about the Ruby ecosystem.

Hell, just finding out what methods can be called from a given code location is something that most Rubyists I’ve met answer either with a runtime debugger or hard-fought and non-transferable memory about a particular piece of code.

Like, I don’t need perfectly accurate programmatically-available answers to those questions in my IDE (though that would be nice). I’m fine reading code and working it out if things are added via reflection/metaprogramming. But if the domain of code to read to determine those things is “who knows/could be anything in the codebase or dependencies”, this is a poor quality tool and/or community.

If you read that and think I’m complaining about one specific instance, codebase, or Ruby community habit, I promise I’m not. It’s not about the 2014 obsession with “DSL”s (that aren’t really DSLs); it’s not about method_missing, open classes, pervasive monkey patching, and so on. It’s about all those things, and more, and the overwhelming enthusiasm (with no small side of smugness) with which the Ruby ecosystem doubles down on them constantly.

Is it the language itself? The community? I don’t know, but I know there are plenty of equivalently capable alternatives to both, and that’s enough for me to avoid the hell out of Ruby and Rubyists for a long time to come.

Is Ruby the worst? No, that honor goes to a multimillion line Perl monolith worked on by far too many not-as-clever-as-they-thought-they-were people over far too long. But all the Ruby I’ve worked on is close enough to that experience to make me question the choice of tool.

[sidewndr46]

I think it is just the result of a community that views metaprogramming as the normal solution to a problem.

I can write perfectly legible and readable Ruby if I want to. But I also could just write Python and it would be easier to maintain.

[mdaniel]

Came back? Everyone and their cousin is falling over themselves to get on the AI train[1], and spending incomprehensible amounts of energy trying to "lint" their way to sanity as if the python ecosystem isn't fighting tooth and nail to "be dynamic"

So, yeah, I look forward to the cycle tacking in the other direction but today ain't it

1: to say nothing of the fact that model servers exist so why the fuck are you writing business logic in a language that DGAF just because your data scientists have a hard-on for pytorch