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Comment by pprotas | Hacker News Reader

Ruby is only relevant because of Rails, and if those two things are your use-cases then you’ll be better off with Python

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Rails is hardly what I would call Ruby’s selling point. Not even the top 5.

Unfortunately the ecosystem suffers from rot because it was a language for trend-followers at one point. But it is still a better developer experience than just about everything else I’ve worked with.

So tell us what are top 5 and why.

GUI stuff with Python sucks just as much as it does with Ruby. I.e. if you want to do GUI, don't choose either of these languages.

GUI kind of works best with whatever language the platform for the GUI toolkit wants you to use, but a lot of the time C++ will be that language, competing with JavaScript. Every other language, almost always will end up having bindings, or some other sort of outsourcing mechanism to connect its runtime to either C++ or JavaScript. If you want to just deal with one language when working on a GUI project, it's best to just go with the one the target platform wants you to use.

Ruby is an excellent language/platform and you can do a lot more than using Rails. But yes I don't know for NLP.

There is an enormous Ruby ecosystem completely outside of Rails.

I would argue that the main selling point of using Ruby is Rails, for sure there are a lot of things you do in Ruby, but for sure in 2024 there are more performant alternatives.

One of the central arguments for Ruby is that performance is not everything (it was always slow compared to other programming languages) but programmer satisfaction is more important.

I'd say Ruby is the programming language I want to program in but Rails pays the bills.

As someone who has worked in Rails performance for quite a long time now I suggest that Rails performance is largely fine. Most Rails performance problems are database and/or architecture issues and not with the language or framework.

And also YJIT has landed, which should help.

Performance is worth infinitely less than the sheer developer productivity of Ruby, at least when used by experienced engineers capable of restraint.

I was only extremely productive with it after adopting Sorbet, but still got by without it at first.

So it's the people not the programming language?

I've written Ruby commercially for about for 20 years, and dislike Rails. Pretty much none of my use have involved it. That includes web dev. Use of Ruby outside of Rails is more low key, but it's out there. My last project involved Sinatra for our web app and financially modelling and simulations for a VC fund in Ruby.

For NLP you will have less choice than for Python, but worst case you can bridge to Python code.

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