News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by mcantor on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:14PM (#1368652)
I once asked a team leader, who had .net and PHP experience and was in the middle of a large Ruby On Rails project, what the benefits of Ruby and Ruby On Rails were. She could not think of a single one.

I once asked a liberal what the benefits of conservatism were. She could not think of a single one! Conservatism is doomed!

Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by aphyr on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:10PM (#1368635)
"...dynamic, non compiled languages are neither clever nor difficult to implement."

Some days, HN really needs a downvote. This article is not even wrong.

Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by st3fan on Friday May 21, 2010 @03:44PM (#1368525)
OMG WE ARE ALL DOOOOOMEEEEED! (Dr Evil Laughter)

What a bunch of blah in that article. Ignore it.

Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by GrandMasterBirt on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:08PM (#1368624)
Look, it is true that Ruby is not fast like other languages. But the goal is to focus on algorithms, prototyping, delivery, working. Get that going and you make money because you have a product. Afterwards you can translate to Java or whatever when you have the money.

I don't love ruby because of lack of generics in Java. Or lambdas (though that would help in java).

In any case... I say don't ignore it, but keep an eye out for changes in the community. When the Ruby community shifts to another language, thats when Ruby dies.

Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by risotto on Friday May 21, 2010 @05:19PM (#1368901)
What a joke. Ruby might not be as popular as C or even Perl on TIOBE but that doesn't mean it's dead or dying.

The Ruby community is spending a lot of effort on finding elegant and friendly and fun ways of coding. Once you use something like Sinatra, it's hard to go back to any other style of coding web applications (even Rails).

And in general, once you get familiar with Ruby it's hard to use a language that doesn't have a nice block syntax, method_missing, and other metaprogramming techniques.

Personally I'm are aware that I don't need these, and that I'm taking a performance hit using Ruby and interpreted tricks, but unless I'm working on high performance code, the only thing that matters is my ability to flesh out ideas and have my coworkers be able to maintain some of my code with me. This is way easier in Ruby than in C.

The Ruby community is very sustainable, and all of computer science and programming is advanced by this effort. Take a look at Java's Spring Roo for evidence that Java needed to learn some lessons from this Ruby on Rails whippersnapper.

Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by tptacek on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:19PM (#1368684)
Someone want to give me a tl;dr summary of this article? I closed the window as soon as that stupid photo loaded.
Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by gvb on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:30PM (#1368730)
The photo was the best thing on the page. The text was sillier than the photo.
Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by draegtun on Saturday May 22, 2010 @05:38AM (#1370078)
The article is an opinion piece about the "decline" of dynamic languages. Skip the article (and pic!) and scroll down to comments because that where its more interesting.
Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by larrywright on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:10PM (#1368633)
The best part was where he pointed at Visual Cobol as an example of something better. Wow.
Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by bgnm2000 on Friday May 21, 2010 @03:47PM (#1368534)
hahaha, this was hysterical.
Re:The Knife Is Out For Ruby by humblepatience on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:13PM (#1368646)
"I once asked a team leader, who had .net and PHP experience and was in the middle of a large Ruby On Rails project, what the benefits of Ruby and Ruby On Rails were. She could not think of a single one."

run?