[pyrotechnick]

This move marks the beginning of the end of a four year long effort for Twitter to rid themselves of Ruby.

History will remember the entire Ruby industry as a series of compounding failures.

The de facto formalisation and specifications.

The black-box behaviour of core development.

The broken-linked, un-versioned docs.

The rampant cargo-cult mentality.

The arcane exceptions.

The meta-frameworks.

Gem hell.

1.9/2.0

Rails.

[SoftwareMaven]

I'm not a Ruby developer, but I still can't help thinking, "WTF".

No technology stack is perfect, but I've yet to meet a stack that was pure evil. There may be some cargo-cult personalities in the Ruby community, but, if there is, it's only because there is value in it.

An infinitesimal number of sites have to deal with Twitter's scale problems. The rest can work on getting crap done instead of worrying about Maseratti problems.

[knowtheory]

Allow me to be withering in my criticism of GP.

Cargo-culting is what you accuse others of when they are learning and you do not like them.

The appropriate way to deal with newbies who do not fully understand the consequences of the decisions they have made (perhaps even while they are advocating others join them), is to explain their rhetorical and technological shortcomings in a way that others can learn from. Accusing someone of "cargo-culting" is just unhelpful character assassination.

Also, weak-sauce.

[thebluesky]

> No technology stack is perfect, but I've yet to meet a stack that was pure evil.

As someone who has seen Ruby cause major problems I'd have to say it's not too far off "pure evil"

[cglee]

You must also think cars and SQL are also pure evil?

[thebluesky]

Relative to other tools we've used, Ruby has caused a disproportionate number of problems.

[cglee]

Some context of what those problems were, how you were using Ruby, what was the expertise of your team members, etc would be of interest for such an inflammatory accusation. Bold claims require proof.

[lmm]

Aren't they?

[pyrotechnick]

argumentum ad populum

[foz]

> History will remember the entire Ruby industry as a series of compounding failures.

This is a bit dramatic. Despite its faults, the language and community around it have been quite a success story. It's had a huge and positive influence on the web development world.

[knowtheory]

It's also worth rebutting douchebag trolling with the Ruby community's actual merits.

The Ruby community, really really cares about developer tooling and teaching others. Ruby is also one of the nice places where object oriented programming touches metaprogramming.

Don't forget that a lot of sysadmin work is done in Ruby now. Both Puppet and Chef are written in Ruby, and that Github and Heroku both came up out of the Ruby community.

[pyrotechnick]

argumentum ad novitam

[knowtheory]

It's time to pack up and go home if you are going to straw man Github and Heroku as being popular merely because they are novelties or fads.

[pyrotechnick]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Project_management_sof...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cloud_platforms

[nicholassmith]

You can throw wikipedia links to try justify an argument ("hey, look at how many other projects there are!"), but GitHub and Heroku both leverage RoR heavily and both are incredibly large, successful products. Having competitors does not a failure make.

[wmil]

> Gem hell.

Is this really a problem? Every package/dependency manager seems to blow up on occasion. Gems haven't given me the problems that I've had with Pip/CPAN/Autoconf.

[knowtheory]

It's enough of a problem that bundler was written. Of course Bundler sorts the problem out pretty well so... Hell averted :P

[Xylakant]

Well, bundler solves a problem that's related, but tangential to what rubygems does. Rubygems is first and foremost a packaging format for libraries. It handles loading, provides a common format to specify dependencies (gemspec) and a default code layout for libs. It does not to dependency resolving.

So what people used to call "gem hell" was actually "I need to specify all my dependencies and take care of conflicts myself." That's what bundler does. And it uses rubygems to actually retrieve, install and load the gems.

[yxhuvud]

The only Gem hell I know of is when using distro packaged gems. They tend to do weird crap like changing dependencies or backport fixes instead of packaging the new version.

There are things more funny to do than solve bugs introduced by a backported patch.

[pyrotechnick]

Hell: not really a problem.

[philwelch]

Obvious flame bait. Please don't post this garbage on HN.

[pyrotechnick]

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=philwelch

[colinbartlett]

I call bullshit. This doesn't spell the end of anything. Ruby isn't the right tool for the job and hasn't been at Twitter for a while. This is old news. Ruby has a place in a lot of other scenarios.

[keymone]

sir, troll more please