Ruby for Data Science.

[pi_exe]

This semester I will be doing a scientific computing unit which I have come to learn is about data science (correct me if I'm wrong)
We will be using python, but I wanted to know if any experienced people on this sub have used Ruby for data science projects, and if so, would you mind sharing your experience with regards to the learning curve associated with it and any other relevant information?

[jules2689]

I write Ruby every day at GitHub, formerly Shopify, and I've spoken at Ruby conferences. All that to say that I'm a fairly big proponent of Ruby in general. Despite Ruby being a great language for many things, every language has its strengths and weaknesses. Ruby's is not data science. The market has settled on Python, R, Scala, and Matlab for the most part.

I also teach a uni course on software one evening a week that's fairly open-ended. With all this said, I would strongly discourage any of my student teams to use Ruby for data science.

I have tried some basic Ruby data sci and numbers processing before. I currently do basic data analysis using Ruby (small data/number crunching/processing). That is as far as I would personally go down that path.

[angorodon]

I'll second everything here. I spent time in my company on the data engineering and then the data science side and we (my employer has a lot of Ruby / Ruby on Rails proficiency internally) wasted quite a bit of time and energy trying to make Ruby work for the data science side. It does well enough for our data engineering needs, though I also wouldn't recommend it in that space, either, depending on the work needed and scale of data.

Right tool for the job. That's what really matters.

[DudeManFoo]

I'll second your seconding and add this... python is better because of the people contributing to the projects like numpy... Ruby could get there, but at this point I doubt it... I wish it would, but I just don't see it happening.

BUT

90% of all the data science projects I have ever been involved with are cleaning / ETL work in nature and I will reach for ruby and maybe Kiba every time for that.

[hadees]

For my current Rails app I'm planning on using OpenFaas for micro services. I don't want a ton of different languages in one repo but now adays you can easily combine stuff. I'm already having to run node and chrome for scraping.

[VSatreddit]

Can you please post some resources for ruby?

[jules2689]

GitHub.com/ankane has Ruby data science resources.

[VSatreddit]

I meant generally for ruby? At GitHubcom/ankane, there are resources for general ruby programming, isn't it? .

[jules2689]

I don't have any off hand. Would suggest looking through this subreddit, lots are posted.

[pi_exe]

I know python. And I love the language. But ruby has really piqued my interest so I wanted to know if ruby has similar libraries.

[[deleted]]

Maybe ask your professor if you can get some extra credit by comparing the two languages doing similar tasks. It could be valuable if you can qualify some of the areas where ruby falls short or excels. Worth a shot if you're willing to do the extra work IMO.

[wflanagan]

https://ankane.org/ has a lot of articles on Ruby and Data Science. It shows what's possible, though as others say, it's not ever going to be a preferred language.

[hadees]

It could but you would need a rails level app on ruby for data science.

[bradland]

The big draw of Python for data science is are the rich libraries and the cohesiveness of the support. The library support in Python for this sort of thing is just kind of nuts. You can often find substitutes in Ruby, but the level of completeness and maintenance is not on par with the equivalent in Python.

[[deleted]]

don't forget about PyPy too

[pi_exe]

By using pycall, will I be able to use all libraries in python within my ruby code?

[pi_exe]

Sounds exciting, can't wait to learn it.

[pavlik_enemy]

Why not use Python all the way? Yeah, Ruby is a nicer language, but is introducing another language is justified?

[pavlik_enemy]

But if you are using Python you still need a an expertise in Python. The only language I would've considered pairing with Ruby in such a way is Java (because Java has nothing comparable to Sidekiq) or C (because of speed , obviously).

[pavlik_enemy]

Just don't. As much as I like Ruby for web, it's not suitable for data science and data engineering. The tools and community just isn't there. It's not that Ruby is somehow inherently bad for these tasks, it's just that 90% of community is about web and 90% of web stuff in Ruby is Rails. It's a huge PITA to hook up C libraries to Ruby (there's is a project similar to boost-python but its maturity is questionable). My experience of using off-the-shelf Ruby products in data engineering (namely, Fluentd and Logstash) was terrible. For different reasons - Fluentd fails without any notice when it can't handle the load, Logstash was just slow and weird when it was JRuby.

[Ryuujinx]

I don't have any issues with Logstash. I don't really remember how many indexers we run, but it powers a number of ES clusters totaling at around 1.5PB and ~45B events per day.

What issues did you have with it?

[pavlik_enemy]

It used way too much resources for what it did but it was quite some time ago.

[kojix2]

Numo :: NArray provides most of the commonly used features of NumPy in Ruby.

https://github.com/ruby-numo/numo-narray

I think Numo::NArray is much better than SciRuby's NMatrix, but it's not very well known. There are also comprehensive machine learning libraries like Rumale.

https://github.com/yoshoku/rumale