[torben-friis]

Honestly I don't know why would you choose ruby for vibecoding.

This is a language that explicitly sacrifices important stuff like the strength of automatic checks possible and performance in lieu of developer ergonomics. Even if you support that particular choice, chosing the language when you won't be writing or reading most of the code is a pretty poor tradeoff.

[cknoxrun]

The interesting part is that agents are good at adding the safety layers (type safety) that exist for Ruby, but which add developer/cognitive overhead (such as Sorbet).

I actually find, for some reason, that LLMs seem to be able to be more "creative" when it comes to Ruby (having used LLMs across 4-5 languages). I don't mean hallucinating, but crafting solutions I would not have thought of, even if I've ensured that I've inserted my original thinking at the beginning.

I wonder if there is something about the combination of the expressiveness of Ruby and the way LLMs are closely tied to human language that brings that out. Of course, usual caveat: n of 1 on my own experience, and a dose of bias.

[flats]

I have had similar experiences & we are not alone: https://bytecode.hr/posts/why-ruby-is-the-better-language-fo....

There are indeed so many compelling arguments against using Ruby these days (e.g. performance, type safety, an increasingly small user base), & yet I continue to reach for it because of this effortless expressiveness (& the maturity of the ecosystem).

[vinceguidry]

I choose it because I know and love it. If I gotta go figure out what the bot did, I'd much much rather try to figure out its ruby than anything else. On the browser plugin I'm making, I took one look at the js code it generated then dropped in a ruby-to-js lib.

I know the bot's not sophisticated enough to metaprogram anything, it writes straightforward code that's easy enough on the eyes, if not to my standards of style.

The idea is eventually I want to build the tooling to where I can actually start writing code again. That code will be ruby.

[ElatedOwl]

My favorite part of Ruby is the testability. You can test anything, easily, without having to make interfaces and other design decisions specifically around tests.

Testing anything in Ruby is dead simple, and agents are very good at writing the tests.

The REPL is also a big win for agents. Reproducing a bug, or exploring how to build a feature, agents can get a lot of mileage out of a rails console.

A lot of the developer ergonomics are just as helpful to agents.

The performance of Ruby sucks, though.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

There is a study that reported ruby as the best language for LLM over something like 15 languages

[isityettime]

Link?

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Looks like I misremember, it's not a study but just a blogpost with some benchmarking. And it's not first, but third: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582728

[isityettime]

I see Clojure actually tops the list! It seems this lines up with what one would've guessed even pre-LLM: the most token-efficient languages are highly expressive languages where concision is also a requirement for idiomicity.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I need to find it, but it was on HN

[saghm]

I honestly don't get why anyone would choose Python over Ruby other than network effects (which just shifts the "I don't understand why they chose it" to the earlier developers rather than eliminating it), but it's pretty clear that a lot (probably most!) people have the opposite opinion. Sometimes people just prefer different things than us, and even if the answer is "they're fond of Ruby and it makes them happy to choose it even if they never look at the code", I can't really blame that line of thinking for a personal project.