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Comment by eggsnbacon1 | Hacker News Reader

to me, this sounds more like "Ruby tools don't have sane defaults unless you use Rails"

Some examples from crufty Java world. You magically get connection pooling with any JPA provider. If you import a logging library, it magically works. Flyway and Liquibase db migration tools have built-in failsafes, and "just work" with defaults.

I think Ruby suffers immeasurably from most things being built for Rails. In Java and Python, there's so many options that everything is forced to be modular when running standalone and play nice with various frameworks.

Ruby is loved for Rails, but Rails is slowly killing the langauge by making it hard to do anything without it. For most purposes, Ruby is Rails. To me this is a good reason to use a different language where I have flexible options

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If you import log4j it automatically does exactly nothing and to a total beginner it's absolutely not understandable why a logging framework wouldn't log.

Unless they changed something in recent years, but to me it's been the worst logging framework I've ever seen.

now that everything is using SLF4J all you do is import it and put a config file in one of various supported places in project

But most Ruby devs don't want flexible, they want Rails. And this article makes a good case for why that's a good thing. It's also happening in php world where it seems 90% of projects now go with Laravel.

IMO its happening to languages that are no longer popular enough to maintain multiple frameworks. The difference with Ruby is that it was always mostly rails. I'm worried Ruby will descend into a Rails death spiral. Depending so heavily on one framework stops innovation

I think you’re right to worry, I wouldn’t be able to think of any reason to use Ruby instead of something else if Rails is off the table (in terms of ecosystem, not talking about personal preference here). Which is a shame because I like it the most of all the scripting languages, but Rails just sucks all the air out of Ruby.

I recently used Ruby, Roda, and soap4r for a JSON-to-SOAP gateway project. We didn’t need all of the ceremony of Rails (no database), and needed more velocity than Java could give us, and none of the Elixir/Erlang SOAP libraries actually worked with the WSDLs (plural) we had.

There’s a _lot_ of reasons to use Ruby if Rails is off the table.

Unless you're into data science, what can u do in Python that you wouldn't be able to do in Ruby? Most "famous" gems are still well maintained afaik. The Ruby eco system is still nothing to sneeze at.

Ruby became niche long ago, just have to accept it. It doesn't mean you won't find work in Ruby if that's what you want, plenty of companies depend on it. Rewrites in different stacks are quite impossible sometimes.

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