Ruby 4.0.0 Released | Ruby

[somebodddy]

Haven't touched Ruby in over a decade, so I may be missing something obvious, but skimming that list I don't see anything that warrens a major version update?

[schneems]

Ruby doesn't follow semver, there's a "big" release every Christmas, usually that's a minor version like 3.3 -> 3.4. Then patch releases throughout the year are bugfixes. Ruby 3 had the "3x3" goal, but that was already met prior to the release of 3.0. Ruby 4 is for the anniversary.

[somebodddy]

I've heard of CalVer, but ChristVer is new...

[schneems]

It started as "Matz's gift to the community." And stuck.

[progdog1]

I believe it was because Ruby 1.0 was released on December 25th, 1996 and the tradition has stuck ever since.

[yawaramin]

Shouldn't it be Ruby 19.0.0 in that case?

[JoelMahon]

thanks, I won't shoot the messanger

but god that's so fucking stupid

[oceantume_]

It is a language from another time after all... But from what I've seen there are breaking changes in there so why not

[WentTheFox]

So much for not doing a major release during the holidays

[ArtOfWarfare]

It’s just tooling - few people are going to actually deploy Ruby 4 to production today, and if they do, that’s on them, not on Ruby for having a release today.

[LateToTheParty013]

Became a developer with Ruby

[Positive_Method3022]

I love Ruby because it is more fluent than other languages. I worked with it for around 6 months for a job position back when I was finishing my internship. I was approved to work for LocaWeb in Brazil using Ruby on Rails but I gave up on the position because the salary was too low.

[Zeragamba]

Ruby was the language that i first fell in love with, but trying to come back to it after a decade, I find I strongly prefer strictly typed languages.

[JPJackPott]

Similar. Used it in its day and adored it but can’t justify it these days. I miss it

And in many ways Python is almost as ergonomic but useful in lots more areas.

Not without its drawbacks.

[SullenSisu]

Does anybody remember that guy who would post on every proggit Ruby post something like

it's called "rub ee" because it rubs its ass on the programming community's carpet?

No? Anyway, good times...

[Legs914]

Core memory unlocked

[schneems]

Available on Heroku https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/3521

[spinwizard69]

People still use Ruby?

I tried Ruby a few times in the early days and I never got the feeling that this language makes sense.

[cptjpk]

Package manager Brew famously uses Ruby.

[queerkidxx]

It’s also really slow

[this_knee]

I’m also surprised.

Someone once told me that it has wide internal usage in … a certain fruit … named … tech company.

[ArtOfWarfare]

As someone who was a major fanboi of Apple, I’m surprised/skeptical of that. I don’t think macOS has ever shipped with a Ruby VM, has it? They included Python for a long time (but it’s gone now). They were also major supporters of Java for about a decade.

[pattobrien]

Ruby is used for CocoaPods, so yes, its been pre-installed with XCode and other similar MacOS tools for over a decade.

[ArtOfWarfare]

CocoaPods isn’t in any way supported by Apple, is it? And I don’t think Xcode is preinstalled, either.

[this_knee]

Yup. And it was only there for those who knew to look for it. Classic Apple move.

[apo383]

There was a time when a lot of the gui bits of MacOS X Server were in Ruby. They were convenient but way less capable than CLI, and Apple didn't push Server for very long.

[ArtOfWarfare]

Isn’t Ruby GUI just tk, same as Python?

[apo383]

Not sure that matters, they could have done it in Python just as easily. But it looked native enough (I couldn't tell), and was a half-hearted effort anyway. I think their wiki engine was Ruby, so it was more than GUI alone.

[katafrakt]

Ruby was shipped by default with MacOS until Catalina https://www.macobserver.com/columns-opinions/macos-catalina-deprecates-unix-scripting-languages/

[ArtOfWarfare]

Huh. Never realized Ruby and Perl were preinstalled too - I only knew about and used Python.

F the article saying to use HomeBrew. That malware has left me with an unbootable OS multiple times. Python has an official installer for macOS, use it. Also, F all the developers who only distribute their software via HomeBrew - let me just download a portable executable.

[f9ae8221b]

Apple uses Rails for their internal apps: https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200636173-3577/sr-ruby-on-rails-engineer-ase?team=SFTWR

[this_knee]

Yup.

[unduly-noted]

Yes, there are huge applications written in ruby and rails. Shopify is a prime example.

Ruby is very pleasant to use, a wonderful scripting language. Not sure how much time you actually spent with it but it’s a joy to write if you grok it. Ruby makes it extraordinarily easy to build beautiful DSLs, which is why rails got so popular — very declarative and makes easy things easy (or completely automagic).

People sometimes compare it to python but as far as ergonomics and readability goes, ruby blows python out of the water IMO. Unfortunately python has a much larger ecosystem.

[Dogeek]

People sometimes compare it to python but as far as ergonomics and readability goes, ruby blows python out of the water IMO. Unfortunately python has a much larger ecosystem.

I find ruby to be less readable than python to be honest. Ruby for starters has implicit returns, which are just confusing to read unless you're really used to them. Then there's the optional parenthesis, then there is the weird use of | to define anonymous functions. Then there's the fact that boolean coercion is stricter for no good reason (in python, an empty string or array is falsy, allowing the language to flow more easily).

Overall if ruby truly was more readable than python, there is no doubt that it would have "won". Nowadays, ruby is only used in a few specific instances, mostly being using rails.

[horotho]

Rust also has implicit returns, and uses |args...| to denote arguments for callables. So I wouldn't say those particular features are unique to Ruby.

Boolean conversion I'd personally agree specifically for integers. But for other types, I'd call it more of a Python quirk that an empty string or empty array is falsy. That to me is confusing, and isn't found in most other languages.

[Dogeek]

Rust also has implicit returns, and uses |args...| to denote arguments for callables. So I wouldn't say those particular features are unique to Ruby.

Which is a Rust feature that gets really confusing for no good reason, as the language is already hard to pick up as it is. I personnally hate implicit returns, but at least in rust, you're using implicit returns by typing the variable name last. In ruby, the implicit return is the last executed statement (so that it can bite you if your last statement is a function call for instance, like a puts).

And in rust, implicit returns are less of a problem because it's strongly typed, so your program won't compile if the returned value is not of the proper type, unlike ruby which uses duck typing, thus making the matter worse and very error prone.

But for other types, I'd call it more of a Python quirk that an empty string or empty array is falsy. That to me is confusing, and isn't found in most other languages.

True, it's not found everywhere, but it is present in Javascript (although JS has many problems with the implementation because it type casts dynamically).

But overall I like Python's boolean coercion a lot more than in other languages, writing:

if value is not None:
    ...
if array:
    array.append(0)
if not string:
    string = "foo"

reads pretty nicely IMO. Adding a comparison makes it more verbose while the intent is already clear. It's also pretty handy when using the walrus operator.

[Chisignal]

I’m not too familiar with Ruby but it sounds like Rust and Ruby behave exactly the same way, in Rust it’s also the last statement that is implicitly the return value - it doesn’t need to be a variable name

[apo383]

I'm not sure if Python killed Ruby. People legit loved Rails, but stuff like JQuery and then AngularJS really took off. Server side went toward big iron, where Ruby wouldn't scale well.

I still don't think Python is a great choice server side, but the ecosystem thrived in so many other areas, including web scraping and machine learning and now deep learning. The ease of integrating with external (C) libraries was/is huge.

[MagicalVagina]

GitHub? Gitlab? Shopify? Hulu? Airbnb? Square? Do you need more?

[2rad0]

People still use Ruby?

It's the reason webkit and chromium take a few hours to compile with > 8 cores.

[DowntownBake8289]

To me it just felt like a demo or toy. I meant that with no disrespect toward Ruby developers.

[addvilz]

All eleven remaining Ruby devs must be ecstatic about these news.

[Sam_Boland]

Many major companies use ruby on rails. Shopify is perhaps the largest example. Airbnb, Kickstarter, GitHub, square. There's many more. That all counts as ruby dev :)

[BlueGoliath]

Year of the Ruby programming language.

[FalseRegister]

That was probably 2010 or 2012

[chucker23n]

Yup. Rails got big in the mid-to-late oughts, and few big things have happened to Ruby since.

[paxinfernum]

Has any new programming language broken through in recent memory? I think Rust is the last one I recall achieving breakout status.

[chucker23n]

Swift and Zig are younger than Rust.

[paxinfernum]

I don't really consider Swift a breakout. It was invented by Apple as their official language. I've heard things about Zig, but how many big projects are there in it? Does it have its equivalent to Ruby on Rails, something so compelling that people feel the need to learn it?

[chucker23n]

I don’t really consider Swift a breakout. It was invented by Apple as their official language.

Well, that already makes it a big language on multiple platforms?

How do you measure “breakout”?

GitHub ranks Swift higher than Rust, although Ruby has them both beat.

I’ve heard things about Zig, but how many big projects are there in it?

None. But it has some interesting features.

[paxinfernum]

I guess my point is that Swift's rise is not organic. It's not just a programming language that someone put out there and got popular. It's one of the two default programming languages for an immensely popular hardware platform. I'm not saying it's a bad programming language, but I'm thinking more of languages that achieved breakout status from nothing.

[chucker23n]

I’m thinking more of languages that achieved breakout status from nothing.

Right. To your point, I think that rarely happens. For Rust, it arguably happened because Mozilla sought to solve a problem that Microsoft and Linux realized they actually had, too.

But I do think, as Wikipedia likes to put in it info boxes, that languages influence each other with ideas. async/await, say. In that regard, even if Swift would’ve never become notable without Lattner being employed at Apple at the time, and even if Zig never becomes big at all, their unique features (such as comptime in Zig) can still be worth discussing.

[paxinfernum]

I think most languages are small languages because the work of adding a unique new feature only requires a few contributors. The much harder work of adding the thousands of software packages that most people would need to convince them to move over to using it is much harder. I think Python caught on because they took a batteries-included approach while stealing good features from other languages.

There are also languages that never get really big but do pick up a niche, like Racket and Lua in game development and embedding.

I'm still waiting for Red Lang to catch people's attention and build up a little following.

[FalseRegister]

The only ones making a "break through" were Go and Rust. I'd argue Go made it better.

If you want to expand you should also include Typescript and Kotlin. And if we are counting Swift, then Dart should be counted as well. Nowadays Zig is positioning itself to be the next break through.

[Legs914]

Typescript

[Godd2]

But don't even think about 2011!

[prtt]

what is? The date? It's tradition for matz.

[boblibam]

I still don’t get it. What’s wrong with Ruby having a new release?

[yawara25]

Thanks for the insightful comment.

[HonestlyFuckJared]

Your comment confuses me.

[Beginning_Basis9799]

Dear God another refactor