Saw this gem of a gem on reddit earlier today and there were some trollish comments about no one using ruby anymore blah blah blah which quietly bummed me out. Surprised and Delighted to see it as #1 here on HN tonight!
There’s a lot of folks who get immense schadenfreude talking about things they know nothing about to strangers on the internet who also don’t know anything.
Ruby, specially with Rails, is particularly suited for AI coding, because of how mature it is and convention over configuration: Most of the important stuff is up to date in the model, and the entire thing comes with a fairy comprehensive set of ideas of how to to be used cohesively to built entire apps.
> It's worth remembering that the trolls that complain about Ruby do so because they care about it.
I don't think so. I mean there are complains about stuff you care about like people complaining about Healthcare. (edit: there are other forms of caring, see my grandchild comment)
Dissing on Ruby is definitely not this, they are not Ruby users wanting Ruby to be better. They don't even know Ruby apart from dissing on it is socially accepted, and makes them feel good.
Usually people get huffed up about stuff they care about. Caring doesn’t mean wanting it to be better, it could also mean get worked up about.
Surely a one-off comment about nobody using Ruby doesn’t mean you “care”, but if it is true that it is the same people who keep commenting, they obviously care.
Is it because they are jealous of the beauty of Ruby/Rails, as a Rubyist I’d think so, but who is to say really. Maybe they worked at a company where they replaced whatever their favourite stack is with Rails and they have hated Ruby ever since. It could be anything.
You wouldn’t keep responding to stuff you don’t care about at some level.
Equating caring and wanting it to be better was a mistake on my part. It made my comment not true, and it made you worked-up. Sorry for that.
All in all, I don't think that other forms of caring apply either. I think that parroting "Ruby is dead" doesn't mean that they care about Ruby, it's just a thing people like to parrot, without the meaning realizing in their heads. A form of bonding, a form of distraction, a form of opening to a social interaction, a form of self-reassurance etc. It is lot of things, and caring about Ruby at all is usually not among those (IMO).
I agree. Parroting some meme isn’t caring per se. But I was working under the assumption that the statement that it was the same names who keep doing it. If you say “Ruby is dead” 5 times a year it isn’t necessarily “caring” if it becomes 100 times a year there is something else at play.
I'm not sure what your point is. I care about Ruby and want it to die because I have worked on the Gitlab codebase, which is written in Ruby. It's a bad language and it stopped me being able to understand behaviours and fix bugs.
In contrast I have also worked on VSCode which is similarly huge but written in Typescript. Faaaar easier to work with, enough that I've been able to contribute a couple of medium sized features and several bug fixes.
So when people say "yeay Ruby" I try to discourage them because I don't want more Ruby code in the world that I might have the misfortune of having to interact with in future.
It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.
Compare that to Rust. For all the hype it has, very few companies are shipping products with it. There are a few, but nowhere near as many as are using Ruby.
I get your point but it's a case of right tool for the job. Every copy of Ruby now includes YJIT written in Rust because Rust is the right tool for that task.
It's easy to forget though that number of lines of code required to do something is also a valid metric and Ruby beats Rust on that.
So if you're shipping CRUD web apps that might be a more important metric than say memory usage or CPU time.
Different job, different tool. More people want to ship web apps than write their own JITs.
That's probably true, but also a poor measure of success. I bet there are more companies using Ruby than there are companies using C++, too. They fill different niches, and different types of companies deliver very different products using those languages.
The ratio of people who can code in Python or Ruby to people who can code in Rust or C++ is very high.
I don’t know why “number of companies using language X” is a metric that is used here. Wordpress is serving 43% of websites on the internet as of 2025, so we should all be learning PHP!
Ruby will always have a special place in my heart. I cut my teeth as a young programmer on that language, and I learnt its value (as well as the value of using something else) along the way.
Ruby code can be downright poetic, for better or worse. There's a certain kind of magic to the kind of code it enables. That's not always good, but it _is_ beautiful.
I encourage everybody to read the venerable "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" [1] to see what I'm talking about.
I wish Ruby was cross-platform. It still only works on Windows using the MSYS2 emulation layer, and the only reason as far as I can tell is that it committed hard and early to `fork()` as the main way to use multiple cores.
The best Ruby always surpasses the elegance of the best Python... Unfortunately for practical means at this point I go for Python: more libraries, less problems with the C implementation of the interpreter (had issues with the GC in the past), better LLMs understanding of the code.
Happiness of a developer writing code can be a misery of a one having to read / debug it.
I worked in ruby for a couple years around 2009 and having to deal with a code that implemented most of its logic via method missing is still one of the strongest negative memories I have about coding.
Another annoying one from that category is Ruby's forwarded methods. Since they're created via generated, injected code, you can't query which method it forwards to at runtime. Or not easily anyway.
Go ecosystem is generally good. However, given that Go as a language doesn't have any "fancy" (for the lack of a better word) syntactical features you can't create DSL's like this
though Ruby's expressiveness comes at a cost and I'd personally stick with Go in a team but use something like RubyLLM for personal projects
I'd say they both optimize for DX, but they come at it from very different angles. Ruby is focused on actually writing the code: making it feel expressive, intuitive, and fun.
Go is more about making it easier to build fast and robust systems. But it really doesn't care if the code itself is ugly and full of boilerplate.
As I've gotten more experience, I've come to really appreciate Go's tradeoffs. It's not as fun up front, but on the other hand, you're less likely to get server alerts at 4am. It really depends what you're building though.
langchain and llamaindex are such garbage libraries: not only they never document half of the features they have, but they keep breaking their APIs from one version to the next.
I was about to mention those. I decided a while ago to build everything myself instead of relying on these libraries. We could use a PythonLLM over here because it seems like nobody cares about developer experience in the Python space.
I think it's the very nice-looking and clean high-level API that should be a pleasure to use (when it fits the job, of course).
I'm pretty sure this API semantics (instance builder to configure, and then it's ask/paint/embed with language-native way to handle streaming and declarative tools) would look beautiful and easy to use in many other languages, e.g. I can imagine a similar API - save, of course, for the Rails stuff - in Python, C# or Erlang. While this level of API may be not perfectly sufficient for all possible LLM use cases, it should certainly speed up development time when this level of API is all that's possible needed.
Why does this say it was posted four hours ago on the front page, four days ago on Agolia, 3 days ago on /from and the comments are all from minutes to hours ago here?
1. Moderators can re-submit interesting stories from a second chance pool
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool (This might happen automatically from time to time?) When this happens some of the timestamps get updated but others dont.
If you're wondering about module RubyLLM. That's just how Ruby is often written.
Addendum:
Ruby does not require you to put the opening and closing parenthesis on a function to run that function, and it's not always put there when you have zero or 1 parameter (I find it to be cleaner when you have a parameter, but have no opinion when there isn't a parameter)
In the example code from the link itself, you'll see:
> Ruby does not require you to put the opening and closing parenthesis on a function to run that function, and it's not always put there when you have zero or 1 parameter
mind = blown
I always liked how functionName denotes the function and functionName() calls the function, and then it denotes the result e.g. in JavaScript or in math. But just saying functionName to call a function makes the code read more like English. Code that reads like English > code that reads like math. (And you can still talk about functions of course.)
It comes with the downside that if you want to pass the function itself around, you need to do f=something.method(:the_function), and then f.call(args). It's not a huge deal, but... meh.
Don’t let it bum you out.
You'll often see the same names coming back on every post to angrily insist that no one is interested in Ruby
...apart from them obviously because if they didn't they would be busy trolling something else. :P
I don't think so. I mean there are complains about stuff you care about like people complaining about Healthcare. (edit: there are other forms of caring, see my grandchild comment)
Dissing on Ruby is definitely not this, they are not Ruby users wanting Ruby to be better. They don't even know Ruby apart from dissing on it is socially accepted, and makes them feel good.
Surely a one-off comment about nobody using Ruby doesn’t mean you “care”, but if it is true that it is the same people who keep commenting, they obviously care.
Is it because they are jealous of the beauty of Ruby/Rails, as a Rubyist I’d think so, but who is to say really. Maybe they worked at a company where they replaced whatever their favourite stack is with Rails and they have hated Ruby ever since. It could be anything.
You wouldn’t keep responding to stuff you don’t care about at some level.
All in all, I don't think that other forms of caring apply either. I think that parroting "Ruby is dead" doesn't mean that they care about Ruby, it's just a thing people like to parrot, without the meaning realizing in their heads. A form of bonding, a form of distraction, a form of opening to a social interaction, a form of self-reassurance etc. It is lot of things, and caring about Ruby at all is usually not among those (IMO).
I agree. Parroting some meme isn’t caring per se. But I was working under the assumption that the statement that it was the same names who keep doing it. If you say “Ruby is dead” 5 times a year it isn’t necessarily “caring” if it becomes 100 times a year there is something else at play.
In contrast I have also worked on VSCode which is similarly huge but written in Typescript. Faaaar easier to work with, enough that I've been able to contribute a couple of medium sized features and several bug fixes.
So when people say "yeay Ruby" I try to discourage them because I don't want more Ruby code in the world that I might have the misfortune of having to interact with in future.
It is somewhat objectively true:
https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages
https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/GitHub-Octove...
It doesn't mean much, and this library can be reproduced in any of those top 10 languages from what I can tell.
It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.
It's easy to forget though that number of lines of code required to do something is also a valid metric and Ruby beats Rust on that.
So if you're shipping CRUD web apps that might be a more important metric than say memory usage or CPU time.
Different job, different tool. More people want to ship web apps than write their own JITs.
Engineering is the art of trade offs.
The ratio of people who can code in Python or Ruby to people who can code in Rust or C++ is very high.
Of the many developers who used to write Ruby (myself included), I would wager not many of those same people still do.
Ruby code can be downright poetic, for better or worse. There's a certain kind of magic to the kind of code it enables. That's not always good, but it _is_ beautiful.
I encourage everybody to read the venerable "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" [1] to see what I'm talking about.
I wish Ruby was cross-platform. It still only works on Windows using the MSYS2 emulation layer, and the only reason as far as I can tell is that it committed hard and early to `fork()` as the main way to use multiple cores.
[1]: https://poignant.guide/
Even a goto can be elegant sometimes.
though Ruby's expressiveness comes at a cost and I'd personally stick with Go in a team but use something like RubyLLM for personal projects
Go is more about making it easier to build fast and robust systems. But it really doesn't care if the code itself is ugly and full of boilerplate.
As I've gotten more experience, I've come to really appreciate Go's tradeoffs. It's not as fun up front, but on the other hand, you're less likely to get server alerts at 4am. It really depends what you're building though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43369977
But it seems hashnode.dev as a domain is blocked entirely. Hopefully Ruby gets another chance in AI era.
Keep going! Happy to see ollama support PR in draft.
I'm pretty sure this API semantics (instance builder to configure, and then it's ask/paint/embed with language-native way to handle streaming and declarative tools) would look beautiful and easy to use in many other languages, e.g. I can imagine a similar API - save, of course, for the Rails stuff - in Python, C# or Erlang. While this level of API may be not perfectly sufficient for all possible LLM use cases, it should certainly speed up development time when this level of API is all that's possible needed.
If you see the typescript options it's like giving yourself a water boarding session through your own volition.
haven't tried it yet though
We're running a few very popular services on rails and it's really not a problem in any way.
Ruby: late to the party, brought a keg.
> 166 points|ksec|4 days ago|21 comments
> 168 points by ksec 4 hours ago
But yes; it’s a bit dodgy to resurface old news like this imo and pretend it’s new news.
I’d go as far as to say that being at #1, under the circumstances, means it’s been artificially boosted somehow.
I haven’t the foggiest why anyone would bother though.
1. Moderators can re-submit interesting stories from a second chance pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool (This might happen automatically from time to time?) When this happens some of the timestamps get updated but others dont.
2. Moderators can invite users via email to re-submit stories. https://news.ycombinator.com/invited
If you're wondering about module RubyLLM. That's just how Ruby is often written.
Addendum: Ruby does not require you to put the opening and closing parenthesis on a function to run that function, and it's not always put there when you have zero or 1 parameter (I find it to be cleaner when you have a parameter, but have no opinion when there isn't a parameter)
In the example code from the link itself, you'll see:
which is the same asmind = blown
I always liked how functionName denotes the function and functionName() calls the function, and then it denotes the result e.g. in JavaScript or in math. But just saying functionName to call a function makes the code read more like English. Code that reads like English > code that reads like math. (And you can still talk about functions of course.)