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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

I think Ruby is an acceptable Smalltalk (also an acceptable Perl), with a better syntax. Last Rails project I worked on I had a console open up whenever I run into an exception, allowing me to monkey-patch the problem right away: that's about as much live-coding as I need professionally.

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The Rails console is somewhat clunky but manages to deliver most of the value of a Lisp/Smalltalk REPL.

I haven't been part of the Ruby community in a few years - Market demand forced me out of full time Ruby/Rails and into React/JS/TS land. Is Pry still a thing? I remember being able to drop into IRB via Pry within a running Rails process was extremely powerful and (IMHO) way better than any debugger I have ever used.

Yes, the Rails console runs pry. It is indeed very powerful. My only gripe with it is that when you modify your code, you have to run ‘reload!’ and wait for the entire shebang to rebuild itself. This is opposed to Lisp REPLs where you can send individual expressions into the image with a simple key chord. But again, most of the value is there.

>Market demand forced me out of full time Ruby/Rails and into React/JS/TS land

Same, what a terrible fate we’ve met.

I refused to go all into the React/JS/TS and since I had some leverage to choose the tech I chose Elm for the front-end in my new job where I inherited a Java code base (that's now mostly Kotlin).

No image saving though. There have been times I've wondered why, and what the ruby world would look like if it had it.

Not as much as I've wondered it about the JVM, though.

I love Smalltalk but image saving is overrated. It suffers all the cache inconsistency pathologies in the long run. Many things need to be as stateless as possible to scale properly.

> in the long run

And in the short run?

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