> The story that solidified is: Use Boring Technology. Use [...] Ruby [...]
> I think this narrative, while conventional, is bollocks. [...] Ruby's weird semantics are credited for how one person as able to use it to make a world-changing framework; to call Ruby a "boring" choice now is a testament to how successful the right weird tech can be!
Sorry, but this whole section is bollocks. I've never heard anyone call Ruby boring, and I've had one too many methods monkey-patched in from halfway across the universe to ever call Ruby "boring". Basically no-one seems to use Ruby for new Serious™ Programming™ Projects™ anymore.
This guy called it boring when justifying its use for discourse back in 2013.
> Ruby isn't cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It's not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago. Our project isn't cool, it's just a bunch of boring old Ruby code.
Its not entirely bollocks, you may have just missed the point: technology is cyclical, according to its application. Once, Ruby on Rails was the badass, non-boring way to write apps, now - because it was once so badass - it is 'boring' in the sense that anyone can do it, and you don't really have to think about much - its quite possible to operate on cruise control, and is thus 'boring' from the coding cowboy/techno-aristocrat sense of things.
>Basically no-one seems to use Ruby for new Serious™ Programming™ Projects™ anymore.
Yes, and in so witnessing this, you are demonstrating how non-bollocks the original bollocks was and now is. Such is the cyclical nature of things in our highly stratified industry .. its one layer of bollocks on top of a shit cake, after another ..
Plenty of new Serious™ Programming™ Projects™ use boring technology like Java and have for a long time. Once being the hot new thing and falling out of favor does not mean it's now a proven boring technology.
It's "boring" in the sense that it's been around for a while and has proven itself to be fairly stable and reliable, is not going away any time soon, is no longer changing at a very rapid pace, has some good books written about it. Rust is also fast becoming "boring" in this sense (maybe it already is; I don't keep up that closely).
This is opposed to Rust from 5 years ago, or e.g. Zig today.
That's how I typically use "boring technology" anyway.
> I think this narrative, while conventional, is bollocks. [...] Ruby's weird semantics are credited for how one person as able to use it to make a world-changing framework; to call Ruby a "boring" choice now is a testament to how successful the right weird tech can be!
Sorry, but this whole section is bollocks. I've never heard anyone call Ruby boring, and I've had one too many methods monkey-patched in from halfway across the universe to ever call Ruby "boring". Basically no-one seems to use Ruby for new Serious™ Programming™ Projects™ anymore.