
Switching from Ruby to 100% JavaScript. A 6 months retrospective - MadRabbit
http://nikolay.rocks/2016-04-26-six-months-on-javascript
======
kozak
My favorite quote: "See, unlike in any other languages that consider
themselves more "professional", you can do pretty bold shit in JavaScript and
not be judged. This reduced cost of failure breeds innovation like nothing
else. JavaScript community sips through more concepts and ideas in a year than
Ruby/Rails did in it's entire life cycle."

~~~
MrBra
My favorite quote from the same article:

(on Javascript) "And if you're wondering, yes, it is still a huge mess. Yes,
it is still full of hipsters, like coding on a typewriter kind of hipsters.
And, yes it is still the same single threaded nonsense."

Ruby like all languages has its down sides, which basically all revolve around
lack of speed and proper parallelism, which last time I checked were both
actively being addressed from different perspectives
([http://jruby.org/bench9000/](http://jruby.org/bench9000/),
[https://github.com/grosser/parallel](https://github.com/grosser/parallel),
Rubinius), but I agree that if you need those features now and in production,
then you will start drowsing a bit.

Another big down side in Ruby from my point of view is a lack of a proper GUI
toolkit. But, it's hard to be big in every side, without running in a browser
being backed by a giant like Google (but Opal
[http://opalrb.org/](http://opalrb.org/) can help with that.. and I think that
[https://github.com/zach-capalbo/flammarion](https://github.com/zach-
capalbo/flammarion) should deserve more attention).

To address those missing features in the meantime I've taught myself C#, which
feels comfortable and solid. At the same time I had to do some works in
Javascript and I got "shit done" too, but it would be stupid to deny that it
was by far the least pleasant experience of the three.

Ruby, even though it's not good a choice for everything, gave a big heritage
to the software development world, the concept that "developer happiness" can
be accomplished (see how many languages Ruby inspired and how many frameworks
Rails inspired) and this will never be forgotten just because JS or another
language is running faster or because it's the browsers default, (though I
reckon this is a big advantage). And "developer happiness", is not as the
author writes just "The idea that a developer should just kick back, relax and
things will happen magically for them". Maybe that was a stereotypical thing
at the beginning stages of Ruby on Rails, with the most popular case being the
Rails "generators". But Ruby community has long got away from this paradigm.
Real "developer happiness" _it 's a thing_. Maybe for Ruby this vision didn't
fully make it to the real world for the reasons at the top of this post, but
sooner or later, with Ruby or some other language, it will.

Lastly, I predict that Microsoft will have a surprise on this thread, too.

