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Comment by prepperdev | Hacker News Reader

Yes. That very example shows why itis hard to write fast program in Ruby. It's not even the interpreter (which is slow), but it's that Ruby is pure magic.

I was never able to understand what happens, when I looked at a particular snippet of Ruby code, if it was not me who wrote it. With Go, understanding others people code is a trivial task.

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What part of

    list.delete(x)

Is hard to understand if you didn’t write it?

I don’t think that example tells the whole story. You have to zoom out and consider what code based look like when this trade off is made repeatedly by devs. When “easyness” or DRYness becomes king you get ravioli code, and it becomes unintelligible. Keep it simple

My persistent impression of the Ruby ecosystem is that everyone optimizes for clever one-liners so hard that all other priorities go out the window.

If we're still talking about Ruby here: List could be _anything_. It might be a list of numbers, it can be a dataset in a remote server, it can be a web page parsed into a list of sentences, it might be list of people in Active Directory.

You literally can't know what's going on under the hood without popping it and looking for yourself.

Ruby's infatuation with clever magic code is what turned me off it years ago. You can get up to 80% in 20% of the time compared to other languages, but then you spend the 80% of time you have left fighting against the magic to get the last 20% done properly. There's way too much stuff You Just Need To Know.

As much as I don't personally enjoy writing Go. This is a huge benefit. There's a decent amount of conformity around the "right way" of doing things. I'll admit, it has definitely made me consider my approach to solving problems in other languages much simpler. I'm not back to writing loops in JavaScript when I use it. It really bugs the functional programming folks but... no one can argue that it's readable, and it's pretty fast.

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