
Ruby Isn't Fun Anymore - qhoxie
http://adam.blog.heroku.com/past/2008/11/19/ruby_isnt_fun_anymore/
======
markessien
Ruby is stabilizing, but it's stabilizing in a bad way. It's establishing
itself as a language for people who throw tantrums, claim they would never
hire a person who does not use a mac, and whose cat-fighting would put cats to
shame.

Python, on the other hand, is establishing itself as a serious tool for
serious programmers. Python developers don't get calls from crazy teenagers
and blog about it.

People like that are swimming in a pond, and they are holding such long
discussions about the state of the water in the pond, that they don't notice
the rivers, lakes and oceans around them.

I would still not bet any money on Ruby.

~~~
ionfish
It seems a lot more likely to me that it's stabilising as a language whose
users are absurdly stereotyped in the manner you've just done.

~~~
rbanffy
It's somewhat hard not to stereotype them when the loudest among them behave
like ill-behaved 8 year-old children.

I know there is a lot of very serious people using Ruby (and Rails), but the
community that builds businesses around the technology needs to deliver a
message to the kids: that they should behave or their toys will be taken away.

~~~
jrockway
_It's somewhat hard not to stereotype them when the loudest among them behave
like ill-behaved 8 year-old children._

Tell me what langauge you use so I can irrationally avoid it.

~~~
rbanffy
I use Python most of the time I have to program. For the past months, my
working tools have been Outlook, Project, Word and Excel, so, my impact on the
art of programming is negligible. On occasion, I have been seen coding in C,
C++, C#, Java, Forth, Perl, PHP, Dataflex (on Unix), Mantis (on IBM/370s - I
miss the 3278 terminals), several different BASIC implementations (back all
the way to Apple IIs and Sinclair ZX series), various flavors of SQL and even
Bash when the need arises. During my higher education, I used FORTRAN several
times. I learned OOP on Smalltalk and made some simple programs in Actor (a
ALGOL-ish language very much inspired by Smalltalk).

Feel free to avoid any language you want. The point I was making is that I
have no energy to deal with childish behavior of toxic community leaders and
their abandoned minions. Life is too short and my to-do list is way too long.
:-)

I am not saying I will not use Ruby or Rails - it's a very nice stack. But,
most certainly, I will not invest much time contributing to it unless the rest
of the community sheds away its more toxic members.

------
jm4
Move along, nothing to see here... Seriously... This is just some random blog
entry about how Ruby isn't fun anymore because it's no longer a cool-kids-only
thing. "Now it's just what we do for a living." Blah, blah, blah... Spare me
the whining.

Did people vote this thing up without reading it just because it's about Ruby
or is there something particularly significant and worthwhile about this post?

~~~
t0pj
It's possible that some of us are looking through the headlines, and saving
them for reading at a later time.

The fact that the story gets voted up is a consequence of this, perhaps.

~~~
jm4
Very good point.

------
iamwil
I guess it wouldn't be fun anymore if you got your fun from being seen as
edgy, feeling like you're subversive, or from your chatting it up with other
developers about it.

But if you got your fun from playing around with the language itself,
exploring its nooks and crannies, and bring what you learned to other
languages, there's no end to what fun you can have.

_why re-discovered adding and removing mixins from digging around the late
Guy's archives, and implemented it as mixico
[http://hackety.org/2008/10/06/mixingOurWayOutOfInstanceEval....](http://hackety.org/2008/10/06/mixingOurWayOutOfInstanceEval.html)

And hell, this guy implemented fizzbuzz using C++ metaprogramming.
<http://web.telia.com/~u43518104/articles/fizzbuzz.htm>

------
bdittmer
Ruby has a very long way to go before it is the "status quo".

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comatose_kid
All of this 'meta' language talk is tiresome. Just build something and talk
about that, please.

------
jrockway
Don't tell the Ruby folks this -- but a lot of us still have a lot of fun with
_Perl_. I also enjoy Common Lisp.

Just like the adage, "you can write bad code in any langauge", well, you can
bore yourself to death in any language, as well. If you are doing boring
things, your programming langauge choice isn't going to magically make
something fun. (The opposite isn't true, though. If you pick Java or PHP for
your project, you won't have much time for having fun.)

But don't worry, there will always be a new language for the fanbois to latch
on to. This week, it's Clojure. (And for the record, I _like_ Clojure. It's
just hard to read anything about Lisp and not hear 138 Clojure fanbois talk
about "OMG ITS THE JVM!!1", and that is pretty annoying. Blog posters should
be required to install the language and write "hello world" before they start
advocating it.)

------
thomasmallen
I just tried patting myself on the back too. Wow, that felt wonderful.

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zach
Well then, maybe Clojure or Arc can get some of that new relationship energy.
They need it more than Ruby does. I'll still be writing Ruby though.

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bisceglie
I thought the post would touch on the drama and politics that have come up in
the past year. I'm relatively new to ruby (~2 years) - and this might just be
a community thing that every language eco-system cycles through...

But regardless, I think that ruby has a while before it loses steam. It's
inherently a fun language

------
jcromartie
I think this is true. Part of the fun of Ruby a few years ago was "sneaking it
in" in a particular environment and having people wonder where you found the
time to develop all of these new utilities you were using.

~~~
lackbeard
I don't understand this at all. Not saying it's wrong. Just saying that I
don't seem to be wired this way.

What I find fun about ruby is that, for better or worse, the language makes it
convenient to express programs in a way that is very close to how I naturally
think about them. Also: it's got pretty good libraries and a good community.

I would've found this blog post worth reading if the author would've explained
why the shift from upstart to accepted technology means that for people like
him ruby is no longer fun.

