Is ruby dying?

[kt_]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

@lucas1 said in Is ruby dying?:

Have you heard of the "Dark Matter Developers", these aren't the people that post about their job on blogs, reddit, medium (on here) etc. I worked at shops that were VB6 / Classic ASP.
.NET is massive, new projects everyday is being built using .NET, there are probably trillions of lines of code that run on the CLR. ASP.NET WebForms which is a layer on top of .NET is supposed to be dead, I make a fair bit of cash adding new features in that environment. Same with WinForms dev, I recently applied for a job doing just that, for a new project (has to work on XP).

That's a good point.

On the other hand, that's the long tail of the industry, not the spearhead. If you looked at "dark matter developers" 20 year ago, they'd be all doing cobol or some strange IBM thing.

Change will reach them too in the end.

Like conservatism, they can put break on things, but can't dictate the direction.

Well, it's all fine and dandy, but your comparison of .NET with COBOL doesn't really hold because there's no advantage to having JS server side, apart from MS IS BAD! COBOL died because it was unfit to survive, while .NET is not.

Whether it will die because of CADT and SPAs is another question, however I'm not really sold on this one. It would mean death of all platform-specific software, and I can't see that coming.

[cartman82]

@lucas1 said in Is ruby dying?:

@cartman82 It is irrelevant. .NET is a mature and stable platform that is known to work rather well.

So were many others, now relegated to museums.

[kt_]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

@kt_ said in Is ruby dying?:

How is JavaScript statically typed?

JSHint, TypeScript (which swept away dynamically typed ruby-lookalike Coffescript, BTW), Flow.

I expect in a few years ES2019 or something will introduce some type hinting into the language as well.

You're just enumerating reasons why .NET is cool, you know that, right?

[Dreikin]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

@kt_ said in Is ruby dying?:

How is JavaScript statically typed?

JSHint, TypeScript (which swept away dynamically typed ruby-lookalike Coffescript, BTW), Flow.

I expect in a few years ES2019 or something will introduce some type hinting into the language as well.

If we're talking about transpilers, like I said before: .Net -> WebAssembly could be interesting.

[dkf]

@lucas1 There's also a lot of demand for Java; many developers seem to specialise on either the .NET or the Java stacks, and then don't see the ads for the other side much, and even within a corporation that uses both, the parts that use the two sides usually don't mix much.

Ruby OTOH is sliding off towards obscurity. People are going off Rails (and rightly; Rails is a mess that is insanely difficult to maintain) and that was always the only big draw of Ruby. How quickly it gets dropped entirely for new work (existing codebases are another matter) is unclear and difficult to predict,; there's quite a lot of other languages in that semi-obscure space, where they're well-known in one area and unheard of outside it, but the big competitor for mindshare with it is the current hotness behemoth.

I wonder what will come after Node? The complicated mess that is its system for doing asynchronous programming means that there's definitely room for a challenger, and the benefits of Javascript on browsers really don't make for any great shakes server-side. (It might be something strictly typed… but then after a bit people will remember why strictly typed languages aren't used universally and we'll go round the spin-cycle again.)

[cartman82]

@RaceProUK said in Is ruby dying?:

Apart from .NET Standard 2.0, which will see the .NET ecosystem spread across as many OSes and platforms as Microsoft can shove it onto, and will form the very foundation of the tech stack. Also, there's ASP.NET 5 and ASP.NET MVC 6 currentl in development, and of course there's the current Wndows 10 UWP standard, which MS are pushing.

True.

But the launch was bungled, a lot of people have moved on and MS is still haunted by their past. Competition on the server is fierce and ASP.NET doesn't really have much so far to distinguish it from the crowd. And UWP is flawed and Windows only.

There's a chance MS might rebound, but it's in no way a certain thing.

Also, @Maciejasjmj and other MS appologists should note that even fucking Microsoft agrees with me that standard .NET 4.x is doomed and is trying to "reboot" their ecosystem.

[kt_]

@Dreikin said in Is ruby dying?:

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

@kt_ said in Is ruby dying?:

How is JavaScript statically typed?

JSHint, TypeScript (which swept away dynamically typed ruby-lookalike Coffescript, BTW), Flow.

I expect in a few years ES2019 or something will introduce some type hinting into the language as well.

If we're talking about transpilers, like I said before: .Net -> WebAssembly could be interesting.

Cartman also convenientaly pretends to forget about Xamarin and Unity.

[cartman82]

@kt_ said in Is ruby dying?:

You're just enumerating reasons why .NET is cool, you know that, right?

.NET was cool, but its time has passed.

[lucas1]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

But the launch was bungled, a lot of people have moved on and MS is still haunted by their past. Competition on the server is fierce and ASP.NET doesn't really have much so far to distinguish it from the crowd.

It has one thing, it works and is stable as fuck.

Stack overflow is a testament to this, it is C# / SQL Server and it is always up and running. I've been running stuff that just works for years.

But yes I suppose reliability isn't sexy.

[kt_]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

@kt_ said in Is ruby dying?:

You're just enumerating reasons why .NET is cool, you know that, right?

.NET was cool, but its time has passed.

It's time to switch to Java, then?

[cartman82]

@dkf said in Is ruby dying?:

I wonder what will come after Node? The complicated mess that is its system for doing asynchronous programming means that there's definitely room for a challenger, and the benefits of Javascript on browsers really don't make for any great shakes server-side.

Next big things in js in a few years will be generators and async / await pattern, a la C#.

Whether that is better than go's strange quantum tunneling thing is yet to be seen.

[RaceProUK]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Also, @Maciejasjmj and other MS appologists should note that even fucking Microsoft agrees with me that standard .NET 4.x is doomed and is trying to "reboot" their ecosystem.

TIL 'doomed' means 'one of the top 3 most popular development frameworks in current use'

[lucas1]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Next big things in js in a few years will be generators and async / await pattern, a la C#.

JS already has this, it is called callbacks.

[dkf]

@RaceProUK said in Is ruby dying?:

Apart from .NET Standard 2.0, which will see the .NET ecosystem spread across as many OSes and platforms as Microsoft can shove it onto

But will it get adoption by the quite large number of developers who aren't typically using an MS dev stack at the moment? If it instead just makes it easier for people who have already bought into the .NET stack to spread to other underlying platforms, the impact will simply not be anything like as great as you think. And that's pretty much independent of how good the technology involved actually is.

[cartman82]

@dkf said in Is ruby dying?:

(It might be something strictly typed… but then after a bit people will remember why strictly typed languages aren't used universally and we'll go round the spin-cycle again.)

I hope we zero in to some kind of optional typing / type hinting. I found that the most productive paradigm so far.

[RaceProUK]

@dkf I don't see .NET Standard dramatically increasing uptake of .NET either. What I do see is actually pretty much what you see: existing .NET developers spreading their software to more platforms. Sure, it may not be glamorous, but expansion by stealth is still expansion. And most importantly, it keeps .NET relevant, which in the end, is all that really matters.

[dkf]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Whether that is better than go's strange quantum tunneling thing is yet to be seen.

Actually, Go's stuff is parallel programming done by someone who's actually read and paid attention to some of the theory in that part of computing from the past 30 years (instead of fucking around with shared memory and locking. Again.) Which would be awesome, except they also decided that they totally hate exceptions.

[Maciejasjmj]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Too much resources invested into optimizing javascript. Big players behind web browsers will not want to rock the boat with a new language.

Except for all the web assembly, NaCl, asm.js, etc. initiatives. Javascript might remain the lingua franca all browsers use, but that doesn't mean anybody will be programming directly in it. Even today things like TypeScript are taking over vanilla JS development, and if that trend continues, it's more than likely that in the future we'll be moving to properly typed languages that compile down to JS, and JS adapting to that use.

Or maybe the browser vendors will finally pull their heads out of their asses and ditch JS entirely - perhaps by actually giving us proper web assembly that current JS code will compile down to, allowing it to be slowly phased out. One can hope.

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

And with the browser increasingly becoming the only cross-platform development environment actively maintained across all devices, it will carry javascript along with it.

Front-end development is, as the name implies, just one half of the story. On the server, you care fuckall about portability, but you want your code not to blow up in production because you've made a typo. Which is why statically typed, compiled languages are here to stay.

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Also in its base form, javascript has that easy going noob-friendly nature that elevated PHP and python it their time as well.

Which just reaffirms its status as a dancing monkey language. Which it still is, no matter how much shit ECMA tries to pile up on it to make it usable.

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

All new languages coming up are more niche and technical, I don't see any of them taking over the beginner friendly niche from js.

And of course every language that's more than 5 years old belongs to the garbage bin of history. Java and C# are good enough, so why push another language?

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Microsoft has given up on the powerful Windows only family of .NET and bungled the transition to .NET core.

4.6.1 still works, and works well. Granted, .NET Core in its current state is hipster tech, but it'll either get sorted out, or we'll just go back to .NET Framework and not talk about Core.

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

C# is unappealing to new generations of programmers and startups.

"Man, C#? That's for geezers! Node is the most rad thing!"

Yeah, there's nothing unappealing about C# other than it's somewhat old. Unless you get annoyed by static typing and compiler errors, in which case, go code NodeJS as long as you do it far away from me.

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

The next big fortune 100 company / unicorn startup will not have their software based on .NET, open source or not.

Want to make it a bet?

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Also, ruby is a proud dynamic language in the era where pendulum is swinging back towards static typing.

Unlike Javascript, the most popular statically ty... wait, what.

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

But the launch was bungled, a lot of people have moved on and MS is still haunted by their past.

I'd rather be haunted by .NET 4.x past than Javascript past, thank you very much. Besides, the original .NET was shit. The first Java versions were shit. And don't even get me started on how JS started off.

Point is, languages and ecosystems mature, and then get picked up by more people. Except for JS, which is an equivalent of a 40-year-old living in its mother's basement and playing video games.

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Also, @Maciejasjmj and other MS appologists should note that even fucking Microsoft agrees with me that standard .NET 4.x is doomed and is trying to "reboot" their ecosystem.

They're trying to push it cross-platform, which to me is not the greatest idea, but just like you, Microsoft seems to have drunk the hipster Kool-Aid.

Besides, it's Microsoft we're talking about. Unlike in CADT Node world, "doomed" means "supported for a couple more years", not "delete the GitHub repo and move on".

[cartman82]

@dkf said in Is ruby dying?:

Actually, Go's stuff is parallel programming done by someone who's actually read and paid attention to some of the theory in that part of computing from the past 30 years (instead of fucking around with shared memory and locking. Again.) Which would be awesome, except they also decided that they totally hate exceptions.

Go's designers have allowed their ideology to get ahead of practicality. Their pigheaded Apple-like insistence on doing things their way or the highway might cost golang becoming the "next big language" for servers and apps.

[Dreikin]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

@dkf said in Is ruby dying?:

Actually, Go's stuff is parallel programming done by someone who's actually read and paid attention to some of the theory in that part of computing from the past 30 years (instead of fucking around with shared memory and locking. Again.) Which would be awesome, except they also decided that they totally hate exceptions.

Go's designers have allowed their ideology to get ahead of practicality. Their pigheaded Apple-like insistence on doing things their way or the highway might cost golang becoming the "next big language" for servers and apps.

I thought Rust was the current contender for that future, after Go flubbed it.

[cartman82]

@Maciejasjmj said in Is ruby dying?:

Except for all the web assembly, NaCl, asm.js, etc. initiatives. Javascript might remain the lingua franca all browsers use, but that doesn't mean anybody will be programming directly in it. Even today things like TypeScript are taking over vanilla JS development, and if that trend continues, it's more than likely that in the future we'll be moving to properly typed languages that compile down to JS, and JS adapting to that use.

The problem with that is, javascript is actually pretty good these days. The difference between it and whatever you consider a better language is nowhere near as drastic as the difference between assembly and C, for example.

So even if you had a widely supported web assembly setup with no caveats, there still wouldn't be a huge impetus for everyone to climb yet another step up the abstraction ladder.

So I don't see the transition happening for classical web applications.

There IS a niche, though, in the field of DRM applications or flash-like boxes inside webpages. We'll see.

[cartman82]

@Dreikin said in Is ruby dying?:

I thought Rust was the current contender for that future, after Go flubbed it.

Rust is academic circlejerk personified.

It'll be dead on arrival.

I have much greater fate in Jonathan Blow's language to fill that niche.

[lucas1]

@cartman82 JS as much as I like it is pretty shite compared to C# in every way.

[Dreikin]

@Maciejasjmj said in Is ruby dying?:

They're trying to push it cross-platform, which to me is not the greatest idea, but just like you, Microsoft seems to have drunk the hipster Kool-Aid.

Any hints of a declarative cross-platform GUI toolkit/framework in the recent .Net moves?

[cartman82]

@Maciejasjmj said in Is ruby dying?:

Or maybe the browser vendors will finally pull their heads out of their asses and ditch JS entirely - perhaps by actually giving us proper web assembly that current JS code will compile down to, allowing it to be slowly phased out. One can hope.

The people who have your kind of hate for javascript are nowhere near working groups where these kinds of decisions are made.

Forget about it.

[lucas1]

@Dreikin GTK# has been around forever.

[cartman82]

@Maciejasjmj said in Is ruby dying?:

Front-end development is, as the name implies, just one half of the story. On the server, you care fuckall about portability, but you want your code not to blow up in production because you've made a typo. Which is why statically typed, compiled languages are here to stay.

True.

All languages are now moving in that direction. Javascript, python 3, go.

.NET core and swift have a decent chance in that arena as well, but they are kind of burdened by their corporate overlords. We'll see.

[Dreikin]

@lucas1 said in Is ruby dying?:

GTK#

I'm not sure how I feel about that as an option.

Queasy, maybe.

[lucas1]

@cartman82 ES6 btw is basically making JavaScript more like Java. ES7 will continue the trend to a proper library in a JS runtime instead of having to do this nonsense:

if (!String.prototype.startsWith) {
    String.prototype.startsWith = function(searchString, position){
      position = position || 0;
      return this.substr(position, searchString.length) === searchString;
  };
}

String.prototype.startsWith() - JavaScript | MDN

The startsWith() method of String values determines whether this string begins with the characters of a specified string, returning true or false as appropriate.

Or

if (!String.prototype.includes) {
  String.prototype.includes = function(search, start) {
    'use strict';
    if (typeof start !== 'number') {
      start = 0;
    }
    
    if (start + search.length > this.length) {
      return false;
    } else {
      return this.indexOf(search, start) !== -1;
    }
  };
}

String.prototype.includes() - JavaScript | MDN

The includes() method of String values performs a case-sensitive search to determine whether a given string may be found within this string, returning true or false as appropriate.

It really pisses me off having to maintain these shims for basic functions and having to have these in my own bitbucket and have a gulp script for this crap.

[cartman82]

@Maciejasjmj said in Is ruby dying?:

Also in its base form, javascript has that easy going noob-friendly nature that elevated PHP and python it their time as well.

Which just reaffirms its status as a dancing monkey language. Which it still is, no matter how much shit ECMA tries to pile up on it to make it usable.

These are the languages that actually win in the end. Also see Python, PHP

[lucas1]

@cartman82 Python isn't used anywhere in the UK, as previously mentioned. I would argue that 60% of python stuff is is Science and Financial stuff rather than anything else if you discount Youtube (which was done in python) and Patreon.

PHP is a legacy langauge that has been made decent because Facebook has billions of lines of code in it and they have to improve the language to decrease development costs. Facebook standardised the language and then fixed it after the 2012 outcry from devs that were fed up with it being utterly shite.

The same with JavaScript. JavaScript was one of the worst languages until Google made it good.

Unlike JS and PHP, C# has always been a good language. The CLR was a bit shit in 2002 / 2003 but after 2005 it has been fucking solid, reliable bit of tech. The language has been improved upon in sensible manner.

[dkf]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Their pigheaded Apple-like insistence on doing things their way or the highway might cost golang becoming the "next big language" for servers and apps.

The biggest long-term problems with Go are their hatred of exceptions (which has a lot of non-trivial implications) and their semi-punting on string encoding; “it's UTF-8 but it isn't really enforced and you guys are going to have to understand the gory details” isn't a good strategy, especially on platforms where the system isn't natively UTF-8.

[cartman82]

@Maciejasjmj said in Is ruby dying?:

4.6.1 still works, and works well. Granted, .NET Core in its current state is hipster tech, but it'll either get sorted out, or we'll just go back to .NET Framework and not talk about Core.

You can run from change, but can't hide.

The next big fortune 100 company / unicorn startup will not have their software based on .NET, open source or not.

Want to make it a bet?

Nah. Once they close the last .NET shop around and kick you to the curb, you'll need all the money you can get for reeducation courses into javascript developer foot masseurs.

[Arantor]

@lucas1 Facebook doesn't use PHP any more, not really. They wrote a new forward version that drops some of the worst of the shit, combined with replacing out the internal VM with their own that still outperforms even the improvements in PHP 7 for most of the typical workloads.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language) for more.

[dkf]

@lucas1 said in Is ruby dying?:

Python isn't used anywhere in the UK

[lucas1]

@cartman82

Nah. Once they close the last .NET shop around and kick you to the curb, you'll need all the money you can get for reeducation courses into javascript developer foot masseurs.

I think we would be will be all long dead by then. Maybe in the year 2900, when President Trump the XVIII is reigning the Neptune.

[Arantor]

@lucas1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic

[lucas1]

@cartman82 TypeScript isn't really statically typed. JShint is a fucking linter FFS dude.

It isn't static typing.

You should have said Babel btw.

[lucas1]

@dkf Sorry it was Hyperbolic, but it doesn't seem to be advertised a lot of job sites.

[cartman82]

@lucas1 said in Is ruby dying?:

@cartman82 TypeScript isn't really statically typed. JShint is a fucking linter FFS dude.
It isn't static typing.
You should have said Babel btw.

It's typed enough.

No one is digging all the way back to fucking Java and its crap. Type hinting FTW.

[lucas1]

@Arantor Well yes, they created a shit version of PHP 7. Considering their front end code makes my eyes bleed, I would expect their backend code makes me want to have a living Sky burial.

HackVM btw doesn't outperform PHP7 and it isn't compatible, according to Daily motion.

Dailymotion – Medium

The home for videos that matter.

Obviously this is dependant on their workloads, but it seems that HackVM is a significant dev effort to move to vs just using PHP 7.

[dkf]

@lucas1 said in Is ruby dying?:

Sorry it was Hyperbolic, but it doesn't seem to be advertised a lot of job sites.

It appears to be used by a lot of people who wouldn't self-describe as programmers or software engineers.

[lucas1]

@dkf I didn't mention earlier on that it did seemed to be used by Quant Analysts and Scientists.

[Arantor]

@lucas1 Considering they did it years before PHP 7 - I was working on getting code to run on both PHP and HHVM about 5 years ago - and the fact that it still outperforms for a bunch of platforms, as per something like https://kinsta.com/blog/hhvm-vs-php-7/ it does make you wonder. Yes, it has 'incompatibilities', a fair bunch of which actually resulted because they forked and PHP itself changed after the fork. Shocking that it doesn't function exactly the same way.

So it doesn't work for one site, it works just fine on others. But I guess that would require you actually knowing something about the language and its ecosystem, which last I checked, you don't. Don't get into arguments outside your comfort zone with people who actually do deal with these things.

[lucas1]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

It's typed enough.

No it isn't. Typescript can be just regular JS.

That is the thing, you can do some really clever stuff with strongly type languages that you can't with JS, Method Overloading you can't do sensibly in JS, you gotta fuck about with the args variable.

[lucas1]

@Arantor I won't pretend it isn't swings and roundabout. I am sure that DailyMotion doesn't have the volume of traffic or the use cases of Facebook

But if you have large PHP codebase what would you choose now? I would choose PHP 7 ... it will work without many problems and it will have most of the performance benefits. It is lower risk and higher benefit than HackVM IMHO.

[dkf]

@lucas1 said in Is ruby dying?:

That is the thing, you can do some really clever stuff with strongly type languages that you can't with JS, Method Overloading you can't do sensibly in JS, you gotta fuck about with the args variable.

OTOH, strongly typed languages usually find taking full advantage of variadic calling really difficult. It's a very different paradigm, one of the things that if you change it, you change everything despite it being theoretically pretty much trivial…

[lucas1]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

Also, @Maciejasjmj and other MS appologists should note that even fucking Microsoft agrees with me that standard .NET 4.x is doomed and is trying to "reboot" their ecosystem.

No.

A lot of the .NET Ecosystem is tied to Windows. They know they need to make it cross platform.

.NET 4.X is a solid and mature piece of tech, that works well and guess what. I can run almost all the ASP.NET libs as long as they aren't webforms on MacOSX and Linux, because Mono works pretty damn good.

[lucas1]

@dkf I have no idea what you said.

EDIT: you are talking about the args stuff in JS. So what about the params keyword in C#?

BillWagner

Method parameters are passed by value. Modifiers enable pass-by-reference semantics, including distinctions such as read-only, and `out` parameters. Learn the different parameter passing modes and...

Method Parameters

I supposed because it is an array of one type, it doesn't have the problems you are mentioning.

Look I deal 95% of the time with HTTP, so I won't pretend to know a lot about this.

[HardwareGeek]

@cartman82 said in Is ruby dying?:

there is under no circumstances absolutely NO problem with ruby

==

There are no circumstances under which there is absolutely no problem with ruby.

==
There are no circumstances under which there ruby is absolutely free of problems.

==
There is (at least a minor) problem with ruby under all circumstances.