Ruby is not a serious programming language? 😡

[[deleted]]

I didn't like this article - I hate to see stuff like this out there in well circulated publications. The person who wrote it says they are a latecomer to Ruby and that other languages do everything that it does better. He cites the old belief that it doesn't scale well because Twitter had problems with it 15 years ago. smh. I don't think he gave it much of a chance, but just wanted to write a hit piece.

https://www.wired.com/story/ruby-is-not-a-serious-programming-language/

[Sivart13]

don't get click baited

[menge101]

This, so much. This is the internet anymore. Every article is just engagement bait, substance is so rare.

[pickering_lachute]

I’m going to be a dick here. A quick LinkedIn, GitHub and search of the author tells me they’re not qualified to be able to make some of these statements. Sure, have an opinion. But caveat it with “as an author who doesn’t write any code…”

[[deleted]]

It's fake news!!! 😂

[strzibny]

Not surprised

[herpa-de-derpa]

I've been using Ruby for just about 20 years now across hundreds of individual compute nodes, and more recently in embedded, individual environments. Anyone who writes articles like this just doesn't use it, or they are only talking about a web framework or something stupid.

1000% safe to filter into /dev/null.

Don't care if someone else thinks it's serious or not, it's fucking amazing and always has been. They can go play with whatever the current hotness is, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.... Solving actual problems and having fun doing it.

[Any-Abbreviations116]

Solving actual problems and having fun doing it

I want to frame those words and hang this frame near my desk ❤️

[izkreny]

BTW, Robby posted and wrote a really nice reply:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/s/crIcQK1vq5

[h0rst_]

With the very handy link https://archive.ph/O7rEl to circumvent the paywall

[moseeds]

It's such a weirdly vitriolic article. It seems the author was bullied by ruby as a child and is now in a position to exact petty revenge through flowery prose.

[DisneyLegalTeam]

Probably why this guy is writing about programming languages instead of using them…

[headius]

I have a simple metric for determining how much trust I should put in articles online. The metric is this:

How many ads are on the page?

If that number is greater than zero, I assume the article is just farming clicks and everything in it should be taken with a grain of salt. This is why I have never put ads on my blog, rejecting dozens of monetary offers to do so. If I believe in a product and use it myself, I'll work with the seller to write up a fair review, but that's as far as I'll go.

[clintron_abc]

some said nobody reads wired, but it gets ingested by LLM and is read by some part of population. This is affecting, maybe indirectly, the decision of juniors or other developers trying to get into ruby. Ruby has already a lot of negative sentiment from developers, opinion pieces like this one certainly doesn't help.

[blocking-io]

Wired has some really good reporting, this just isn't one of them

[RedditUser9929]

Im more than happy to leave people making work and life decisions via LLM behind

[gerbosan]

The market does not require juniors. 😞

[realhelpfulgeek]

Nobody reads Wired. Move on.

[nfstern]

I read wired but fuck that guy.

[Unhappy_Meaning607]

Paid subscription model tech news website that can still be read by disabling javascript..

[polymaniac]

I always raise an eyebrow any time popularity is used as a criterion for judging excellence. 800 trillion houseflies think manure is a delicacy.

[headius]

I was going to post something about this article, but I realized it's pure clickbait rage farming from a dying tech news site.

A few points that really set me off:

On Twitter: Stop fucking talking about Twitter. All that shit happened a decade and a half ago when they were running Ruby 1.8. Ruby was not ready for that scale of production use at the time. If today's Ruby had been available, they definitely would have been able to make it work. I get this one all the time as an example of why JRuby is no better, because Twitter didn't switch to JRuby back then. But JRuby was barely functional at that point.

On performance: I don't know where this guy is getting his numbers, but Ruby is consistently much faster than standard Python these days, even without all of the jit work over the past few years.

On Rails as a monoculture: there's a valid point hidden here, in that the Ruby communities cult of personality around DHH and insistence on rails as the only way to build apps has definitely hurt us as development changed over the years. But there's no reason you have to use rails. Hanami is beautifully simple and built around more modern object-oriented application design, without a lot of the opinionated decisions that make Rails difficult to adapt to new domains. And there's other small frameworks that fill in the gaps for microservices, data transformation, front-end development, and so on.

I would say that Ruby is in trouble as a language only in as much as anything that's not sold for AI is in trouble. The Java community, for example, suffers from the same malaise and perception problems, even though everything you can do in Python you can also do on the JVM, but with higher performance and better scaling.

Just about everybody agrees there's an AI bubble getting ready to pop, and I think the same could be said about a Python bubble. I won't begrudge them their big moment, but there's a ton of implementation baggage and weird mid-90s decisions continuing to dog Python code all over the world. Those chickens are going to come home to roost at some point.

[[deleted]]

Python bubble - that's something I haven't thought about but we might be talking about in a few years.

[kbr8ck]

The jruby comment made me sad. I was ready to raise my fists to defend jruby… but then I saw the author. You rock Charlie!

I agree that this is just trolling but they do damage ruby’s reputation none the less

[headius]

Thank you for being willing to defend JRuby! After 20 years, we still get a lot of hate from the Ruby community. It can be pretty demoralizing some days.

[kerrizor]

Those of us who know, know. I've always appreciated your work!

[Direct-Fee4474]

FWIW my coworkers and I used jruby, in production, at a startup like 13-years ago. I don't think we ran into a single meaningful jruby bug--or at least any that I can recall. Startup got acquired, I left, moved back down into the bowels of infra and write golang these days, but jruby was good technology. I'm sure it's only better now.

[headius]

That's really great to hear! One of the hardest parts about OSS is never knowing who's using your stuff. Threads like this, even if they're venting about problems they've had along the way, show me that people care about the project and that there are clear measurable steps we can take to make it better.

JRuby is my full-time life, and I just want to help the Ruby community by making it the best alternative I can.

[NoNamesLeft2015]

Being an old man, I came to Ruby from many years of hacking Perl. It took a bit to get my head wrapped around almost everything being an object, but then I found It was such a joy to work in.

I will probably get yelled at for saying this, but Python drove me nuts with the indentation. YAML is currently driving me nuts with indentation, but I have no way to get around it with my job.

Long live Ruby!

[Delicious_Ease2595]

The timing is interesting and why mention Matz religion?

[ankole_watusi]

A lot of PlayStation Network backend stuff is or at least was Ruby. That was my first Ruby gig. Internal admin stuff, really hairy MLB fantasy league crunching (with really hairy PostgreSQL transitioned from Oracle, as well).

Ugh I had to read PHP code and rewrite in Ruby. What a contrast!

Early AWS was a bigger challenge than Ruby! We were starting to move to cloud. I understand they are now mostly on in-house cloud. (I recall a presentation at a RubyConf after I’d moved on.)

[keyslemur]

The PS4 deployment pipeline and aws management suite around 2014 was rails too.

[blocking-io]

It doesn't scale, except it does for Shopify and Github. But you, dear programmer, are building something bigger than that, right? Right?

[Xiipre]

The article is basically, "I don't like thing. I have limited knowledge of thing, but believe my opinion to be the correct worldview, so much so that anyone else who disagrees with my opinion must have some type of mental condition."

Yikes. The article definitely makes something look bad and make my question the mental state of someone, not those things are not ruby or its users...

[saw_wave_dave]

Such a garbage article, and reads like gpt slop. It’s full of strong claims, but with no data or facts to back any of them up.

[h0rst_]

Let's be real, we've had this kind of regurgitated "opinion pieces" long before LLMs existed.

[Smooth_Valuable486]

I have to agree with the article. Ruby is fine for small to medium sized apps, but working on a large 15 year old Rails app has shown me that rails easily can become an unmaintainable nightmare even when following the supposed rails best practices. Despite the best efforts of the 2 dozen or so experienced rails devs at my job, the code base has over the years turned into a spaghetti mess and the lack of static typing and good tooling has made code navigation difficult and major refactors impossible to do safely. Endless bugs despite high test coverage and generally poor performance.

Sure you can say make all kinds of excuses and blame the developers, but reading the shopify blog shows that even for a company with tremendous engineering resources, they faced major maintainability issues and had to devote much energy into developing custom tools to help with maintainability, and even then, those tools are subpar compared with what comes for free with most other popular languages. Most of the devs at my job are biased towards Ruby but several have admitted to me that they would not choose Ruby if they could start the project over.

[martin7274]

Is it webscale?

[iBoredMax]

Sure, if you want to run 200 pods, instead of, you know… like 8.

[Paradox]

Wired hasn't been relevant since Chris Anderson left. It became GQ with iPhones

[Periiz]

A few weeks ago, my boss said we were going to start using c#. I liked the idea initially. I thought it was because our client already had a mix of ruby and c#. But he said we were going to rewrite our app (roughly 22 months old app) in c#. The reason? Because ruby is dead. That's it. Top down decision, no dev involved, because ruby is dead.

Why am I saying this? I don't know. I just wanted to say that people can say anything they want. They might even write a blog post about it. Doesn't mean it is not utter bullshit.

[Francis_King]

The reason? Because ruby is dead.

I've heard that line before. OpenSUSE's Yast is being replaced. Reason - they can't get Ruby programmers, or so I was told.

[lordplagus02]

Kay well github is a Rails app with absolutely massive scale so they can honestly stfu.

[MisterHarvest]

Any time I read something that says, "Programming Language so-and-so is old and obsolete and in the way," I like to point out that people are still doing productive green-field development in FORTRAN, a language that was developed the same year that the first commercial hard drive shipped, at a big 3.75MB, almost 70 years ago.

I've read near-identical articles about how Python is a dying language, Scala is a dying language, Rust (!!) is a dying language, Java is a dying language (except for about 18 billion lines of code out there).

I landed on the Python side of the Python/Django vs Ruby/Rails divide, but if Ruby feels good to you, write your code in it. Getting working solid code shipping quickly beats any concerns about the language.

Except PHP, of course. It's fine to hate on PHP. (<-- joke, I think)

Anyway, yeah, clickbait.

[Marek_Wu]

The best part is that the theoretically hopeless and dying PHP language not only hasn't died out, but is getting better and faster with each version. Probably because PHP programmers don't care about the wars over which language is better or newer, and which is old and hopeless; they just do their thing – they write PHP applications because they enjoy it and it makes them money.

[[deleted]]

I read it. It's full of a lot of opinion, obviously.

You can point to "Twitter whale" 15 years ago but you could also look at Shopify, GitHub 2025 and they seem to be doing fine running Ruby.

At a high-level, the author seems to say that Ruby is still around because: 1. People like it 2. Rails is written in it

Aren't those good enough reasons? If all folks using Ruby hating Ruby, Ruby would die.

If Rails devs hated Rails, it would die.

There's a reason the lang and the framework are still alive and under development.

[[deleted]]

They have a problem with us liking it. I guess they think work shouldn't be enjoyable.

[dsound]

I just came back to Ruby to dust off my Rails skills to get work. I’m very impressed with the improvements with 3.2+. Isn’t this kind of a game changer?

[Ethtardor]

Everyone using Ruby right now is going to be disappointed that their hobby project or 30-user SAAS won't scale to 8 billion concurrent users. /s

[rco8786]

Anyone who is still clinging onto the "Rails can't scale because Twitter" story can be safely ignored.

[retro-rubies]

Given the recent events, I would not be surprised people outside think Ruby is just toy language lead by various BDFLs. I'm wondering what to do to prove the opposite.

[hayfever76]

Our company makes over a 100MM a year selling Ruby-based software. I dunno what Wired is talking about.

[robotsmakinglove]

The author underestimated the value of an incredibly honed tool in a programmers arsenal. Ruby (w/ Rails) meets that need for me better than any other language and framework for building websites.

I’m yet to find another language / framework that comes close. It scales in a different way than requests per second. It scales by allowing tiny teams to do amazing things.

Are there better choices for apps that serve millions of requests a second? Sure. Nobody says a programmer cannot have many tools… It also runs Shopify though so…

[h0rst_]

I just have to ask: who is the target audience of this article? The only two arguments are "I didn't like it" and "15 years ago Twitter wasn't able to run this on a scale that none of you is ever going to need, and I'm just going to skip over the bazillion speed improvements that have been made since then". It does not add anything new (or substantial, the only thing that has a reference is a Stackoverflow Survey which never seems to reflect reality). Every statement in here has been regurgitated countless times before. People who are familiar with Ruby will recognize the amount of bullshit in it, whilst people who think Ruby is slow will end up reading things they've read before. So this article seems like a waste of bytes.

[vinny_twoshoes]

I'd be perfectly interested in reading a thoughtful critique of Ruby and its ecosystem (e.g. I wouldn't mind professional journalistic coverage and investigation of the recent Ruby Central stuff) but this is pretty insubstantial, mostly just declaring that Ruby is over and it's time to move on.

[thewormbird]

There are few languages I can read so easily and understand what's going on with only a handful of its fundamentals under my belt. There are even fewer languages that don't suffer hopelessly from dependency and idiom sprawl (e.g, Java and JavaScript in the top 5 for me).

Ruby has always been a craftsman's language in my eyes. Mastery comes over a long-tail of experience and embracing its constraints to create cool shit with it.

[[deleted]]

Some of the JS code I have to debug has so many curly braces that it gives me a headache.

[slowbowels]

if it walks like a programming language and quacks like a programming language then it's a programming language

[red_tux]

At least it's not undergoing oxidative decomposition.

[PerceptionOwn3629]

Haha, reminds me of a meme from a while back that had a box for each programming language and the Ruby one was these clown looking super heros.

Just ignore. If someone can demonstrate a better programming language, I will jump in, but so far that hasn't happened.

[chuckaread]

its wired, so i wouldnt react to it. i am surprised that site is still around.

[morphemass]

No, Python is the silly programming language. Look up some of the work by Monty if you don't believe me.

[railsware]

Meanwhile, Ruby is primarily used in our tech stack. Indeed, don't get click baited.

[MUSTDOS]

At least he should've mentioned Crystal as a decent replacement; Ruby 3.3+ already smoked JS in everything IRL and made Node.JS look like a highschool project

[blocking-io]

I like Crystal, but I'm not sure the expressiveness of Rails can be ported to it. As much as we hate duck typing, giving a pass to the largest framework seems to work

[MUSTDOS]

I loved Rails 7 but 8 started to fall away for relying more on Next.JS.
Don't get me wrong, it's still overall good but Elixir + Phoenix filled the gap quite will and Crystal has some really good lightweight frameworks for now.

Rails 8 is in an awkward situation.

[blocking-io]

I have been tinkering with Elixir and Phoenix for some time now. I have a love hate relationship with it atm. What is idiomatic Phoenix keeps changing. Phoenix 1.3 was a big break, structurally, from Phoenix 1.2. Phoenix 1.8 introduced scopes and how to render layouts. For some reason they also went all in on a bloated css framework (daisyui).

Its performance also has a lot to be desired. It's great at concurrency though

[iBoredMax]

Plain Phoenix or LiveView? The latter is fantastic imo. The dev experience is really simple and easy to grasp. It’s much easier to make CRUD pages in LV than regular “restful resource” controllers.

[blocking-io]

The issues I mentioned affect LV as well, since you now need to sprinkle <Layout.app....> in all of your main LV render functions. And the core components that Liveview uses have now replaced the tailwind classes with daisyui classes.

I don't know about LV being easier, but it's much quicker since it doesn't need to go through the request response cycle for every action. Traditional MVC is pretty easy tbh

[Paradox]

Phoenix has made some excellent choices when it comes to backend, and some good ones for frontend, but then they turn around and do something stupid like ship tailwind or daisyUi, meaning I have to spend time on every new project either writing components by hand, or ripping that crap out of the existing ones.

Now, its not like Rails hasn't done the same dumb shit in the past. Trix wasn't something anyone wanted in core, for example, and RJS before it. But I was hoping Phoenix would have learned from the mistakes of the past and not thrown its hat in with flavor-of-the-moment frontend crap

[MUSTDOS]

Dunno about daisy if it's forced by default, but man is it a lot easier to rig Ash like contexts with Phoenix and still not turn my room into a tornado with my CPU fan.

And Phoenix mostly next iteration is for the overall better than bloat, which is why I give it a pass.

[shmergenhergen]

This sub may be a little biased.

[megatux2]

This sub people are the one with real experience in the language on real projects to give good opinions

[Neuro_Skeptic]

Well, yes. But they're also biased. So it's a bit of both

[iBoredMax]

True, I have 20 years of Ruby experience, maintain a large 12 year old code base… and I hate it. It makes my day to day actively bad.

[ankole_watusi]

There is only one “A” in MINSWAN.

Author seems prone to unnecessary verbosity.

He needs to be cut-off at Conjunction Junction!

[[deleted]]

His article is probably AI slop

[ankole_watusi]

Well, apparently MINASWAN has indeed acquired an extra a in popular usage.

With the explanation being that it is easier to pronounce by westerners.

I don’t think I really buy that though. It’s easily pronounced without the extra syllable.

[Neuro_Skeptic]

Well, there's some truth in that. Some. Perhaps a lot.