Hello everyone. I'm Elise, the author of the post. This is just wild. I mostly write for myself and never imagined I'd make it onto Hacker News.
I think an overlooked part of my point in this post is that the language felt intuitive to me from the beginning. It really matches the way my brain was already thinking about code. Think in messages, focus on small objects and what messages they can receive. There's a lot of comments about not understanding Ruby or finding it hard to maintain, but we're all different. I know people who feel the same way I do, but about Javascript, or Kotlin, or even Objective-C(which I find impossible to follow).
I get that Ruby isn't everyone's cup of tea, but for me it's pure joy. And when I'm working with other Rubyists, it feels like we're flying along effortlessly.
I wasn't really trying to comment on other languages. And everything we choose is based on our own design sensibilities, our constraints, and our experience. I really just wanted to put down in writing, what sparks joy for me about Ruby.
I've been through lots of languages at this point over 20+ years, everything from C/C++ and (early) Java onwards. Ruby was one of the first languages that felt like it was designed to try and make life enjoyable for a programmer, at the time, circa 2007, that was in short supply.
I've moved on to other languages now, but I treasure the time I spent doing Ruby, and I've carried many valuable things onwards with me.
Things might change for you too, over time, but that won't lessen the positive impact that Ruby has had being so close to the way you naturally think about programming.
When I first took on a project that was written in Ruby I was extremely annoyed. Once I learned my way around and really understood it better, I loved it. It's still my go-to for just about everything just because of how productive and readable it is.
The performance optimizer in me fights a constant inner battle about the fastest way to do things vs the most productive way to do them. With more time and experience, productivity wins just about every time.
I'm also a huge fan of Elixir and it's always interesting to watch the language discussions because there are people who are absolute "static typing is the only way" zealots out there. I don't use zealots lightly either. Preference is one thing. "Any other way is wrong" is entirely another. Elixir gives you a different way of achieving the same thing with strong typing, pattern matching, guard clauses and type inference via symbols...but it's still not enough for the static typing crowd, no matter how perfect the balance of concerns.
When you find your language, enjoy it. There's always going to be people who find a reason to dislike your choice because it wasn't their choice.
I used to be firmly towards the zealot side of that. Until I tried Ruby and my first experience was cutting down a 7k line piece of code to 10% of that while adding functionality, and it just turned out the typing was much less of an issue.
I'd love to see some improved typing support in Ruby, but it's gone from a "the world will fall without it" to something that'd be a minor nice to have and which doesn't need to be complete.
I appreciate the quick and passionate read! Ruby was one of the languages I sought out when I was trying to figure out if I should switch from PHP before getting on a “set” professional path. At that stage, I’d been doing PHP and web programming for about 4-5 years and just getting through college. Now, some 15+ years later, I’ve (recently) shifted mostly to frontend.
Your blog post made me really consider giving Ruby another shot, and I’m curious if you have any good places to start for someone familiar with programming but not Ruby.
Thank you, and I’ll definitely be reading more of your blog :)
Hello! I'm Elise, the author of the post. Figured I'd jump in and say that in addition to Ruby, I really like Cucumber. But I think the non-technical people focus really cuts a lot out. For me, Cucumber gives the whole team(tech and non-tech) a shared language for what the software does.
I don't use it much anymore, because most companies seem to have moved away from it. But, I do miss it and wish we had something similar that could encouraged that level of shared understanding.
I think an overlooked part of my point in this post is that the language felt intuitive to me from the beginning. It really matches the way my brain was already thinking about code. Think in messages, focus on small objects and what messages they can receive. There's a lot of comments about not understanding Ruby or finding it hard to maintain, but we're all different. I know people who feel the same way I do, but about Javascript, or Kotlin, or even Objective-C(which I find impossible to follow).
I get that Ruby isn't everyone's cup of tea, but for me it's pure joy. And when I'm working with other Rubyists, it feels like we're flying along effortlessly.
I wasn't really trying to comment on other languages. And everything we choose is based on our own design sensibilities, our constraints, and our experience. I really just wanted to put down in writing, what sparks joy for me about Ruby.