I watched the whole thing. Quite entertaining, but the last 6 minutes is what matters. The strengths he mentions are:
- tools and culture that's optimized for programmer happiness and productivity.
- Promoting obviousness via the path of least surprise.
- Consistency through well-considered conventions.
- Carefully-designed value-based test suites.
- Building long-term maintainable apps
I have to ask because I am being exposed to Ruby at work right now and I find it, to be quite honest, a terrible language. I'm not trying to start a flame war, I am writing this cause I want to be open minded and have some hard-core rubyists point me in the direction of where I can learn what is good about this language. Specifically:
1) What tools / culture are optimized for programmer happiness & productivity in ruby? - I don't find anything special about ruby at all. Let me know what improves happiness / productivity. I would like to dl whatever tools / ide / plugins / gems or whatever and take a look into it.
2) Does ruby truly promote the path of least surprise? I am often surprised when looking at ruby code because I find traceability difficult in Ruby. Where does the function come from when looking at a ruby codebase? Is it from a gem? Is it from some parent class that this class has extended? I have no idea. How do people make Ruby 'less surprising'?
3) I have no idea what is consistent well considered conventions. How do I know something is a well-considered convention? Just use a rubocop linter?
4) Carefully-designed value-based test suites: Please explain this. What makes testing in Ruby so much better than in other languages?
5) Building long-term maintainable apps: What makes Ruby apps more maintainable?
Hi HN! I'm the speaker in this talk. Just a heads up that when I refer to "The Failing Hacker News", that's just all part of the satire. It's all love here!
"I'd rather that we all became heroes than just to select a handful arbitrarily"
Preach it brother!
I do miss _why and his antics though.
While in major part satirical this talk does have a serious message. (See from about the twenty-second minute onwards.) Ruby is no longer the new hotness. Javascript is going from strength to strength, new functional programming languages like Elixir and Clojure on the rise, In the compiled language space there's Go and Rust. With our though leaders moving on who do we look to for direction? Imagine if DHH moves on, what do we do then? Justin's point is that the Ruby community needs to become bigger than its heroes.
I see Python taking on the natural language processing, machine learning, computational linguistics space. That's a missed opportunity for Ruby. As awesome as Rails is, its swallowing of mind-share risks making Ruby a one trick pony.
I think this is a conversation we need to have. I know lots of companies use Ruby but at one point I believed that Ruby had the potential to become something like the next Java, and I don't any more.
I love this brief history of the Ruby ecosystem and its community, maybe the Trump parody I've enjoyed most. Maybe, the best.
Incidentally, I suppose the first 5 minutes of fighting with a three-way dongle and a poor connection, having to restart the talk, etc. is just a little preview of what every 2016 MBP owner will soon have the pleasure of experiencing themselves.
Quite interesting, maybe one should also check this older talk:
Robert Martin, "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby", 2009
Ruby has always been a jack of all trade, master of none.
- It is not the fastest dynamic language like Clojure or LuaJit.
- It does not have great C interop like Python.
- It does not have an easily embeddedable runtime as Lua.
- It is not the scripting language of all web browsers like JavaScript.
- It does not have major big business backing like PHP.
- It is not as good as Lisps for meta-programming and DSLs.
- It is not amazing at concurrency like Erlang.
- It is not the bleeding edge of untyped functional programming like Racket or Clojure.
- It does not have every library under the sun like Python.
- It is not as great at OOP as Smalltalk
So while it's perfectly acceptable at all those things, it doesn't excel at anything. That's why I think it is loosing ground.
It does have Ruby on Rails, and that's still arguably the best Web Framework.
The last 6 minutes with the hat off really struck a chord. Excellent talk and couldn't agree more.
I'm currently watching this video and unfortunately I cannot stare at the video for more than a few seconds bc of that glowing green border around the outside of the page.
I finally had to just change the color. OP if you have anything to do with this website, please consider changing that color to almost anything else (or just remove it).
TIL 'Seattle-style' ruby
Do you know where to find the rest of the talks from this conference, by chance?
Keep your weird contained to your monoliths and stop trying to colonize JavaScript!
I loved this video because I got all the references.
I sit on the Ruby on Rails facebook group, and its flooded with people from India trying to learn ruby. What I find unusual is they publish tutorials when there are plenty of good sources such as Railscasts, but its like the last 10 years doesn't exist to them and they rehash tutorials.
Ruby was great before javascript frameworks. I haven't gotten around to using turbolinks but its strongly makes me question whether I should I stop using js frameworks all together and go full on into turbolinks and go back to a simpler time of rapid development.
All of sudden everything in web-development requires you to be an engineer. I think there is a large influx of Uni CS graduates running startups and the only solution in a complex solution such as React. I can use React but I can't understand from a business perceptive why you would want to quadruple your development time and create such a high bar of entry for developers.
#MakeWebDevelopmentGreatAgain #Remeber2006?Imemeber