Versus active record, mvc, yaml configs, bundler, beautiful syntax, robust and trivially extendable stdlib, amazing native debugging and cli docs out of the box, everything out of the box if you're using Rails
I do not understand why it becomes increasingly irrelevant, especially in web development. I kinda get scripting--bash and python tend to run everywhere
Wow! I'd love to hear more about how that's achieved
As mentioned in the post, the only thing really limiting CI parallelism is the ratio of "setup time" vs "test time". If your setup time is too long, you hit diminishing returns fast.
git doesn't care about mtime, but git maintains trees whose hash changes if any constituent part of the tree changes. It'd seem tempting to check for a .git and if present use the git tree to determine whether to invalidate the cache.
Ruby is not without its drawbacks & drama, but it’s elegant in a way that few languages are to this day (how many JS programmers _actually_ grok prototype-based object-orientation?) & compared to NPM, RubyGems is (lately) unexciting in the best way.
(Yes, I'm taking it a bit far; my prototype Ruby compiler is self-hosting finally, so I guess sometime in the next 20 years I'll end up booting into a Ruby kernel for no good reason...)
But like... something like a font renderer in Ruby? The thing that is incredibly cache sensitive and gets run millions of times per day on a single machine? The by far slowest step of rendering any non-monospaced UI?
The Earth is weeping my brother.
https://github.com/vidarh/skrift
(Note that this is a port of the C-based renderer libschrift; the Ruby version is smaller, but much less so than "usual" when converting C code - libscrift itself is very compact)
Generally speaking Ruby has the best APIs.
ActiveAdmin is best in class, Rails is fantastic; but there’s a lot of insanity in the API for a language that “gets out of the way” and “just works”
Slice is my favorite example. (It’s been a bit since I’ve used it)
[0].slice(0, 100) == [0]
[].slice(0, 100) == … For a “give me an array back that starts from a given, arbitrary index, and auto-handle truncation” not having that behavior continues to confuse me from an intuitive perspective. Yes, I understand the source of it, but why?
So saying “give me the array containing the first 100 elements of this array with one element” would obviously give you the array with one element back.
Saying “give me the array containing the first 100 elements of this array with zero elements” would follow that it just gives the empty array back.
On top of that, because ruby is historically duck-typed, having something always return an array or an error makes sense, why return nil when there’s a logical explanation for defined behavior? Ditto for throwing an error.
Seems thoughtfully intuitive to me.
[0, nil, nil, nil, …x100, nil] is the same as [0] in terms of access.
In both cases, trying to access the 100th element (e.g. [0][100]) will give nil.
[].slice(0, 100).each do |x| puts x end
that shouldn't be an error and it seems to be the principle of least surprise imo.
For web stuff, with server-side rendering and partials it means minimal requirement to touch the hot mess that is JavaScript, and you can build PWAs that feel native pretty easily with Hotwire.
Ruby is slow as fuck though, so there's a tradeoff there.
For anything "slow" I can put it in Sidekiq and just run the worker code with TruffleRuby.
I have high hopes for ZJIT but I think TruffleRuby is the project that proves that Ruby the language doesn't have to be slow and the project is still getting better.
If ZJIT, JRuby or TruffleRuby can get within 5-10% of speed of Go without having to rewrite code I would be very happy. I don't think TruffleRuby is far off that now.
when I touch js, and python... I prefer ONLY AI agentic style of working.