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Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language (www.wired.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Ruby survives on affection, not utility. Let's move on.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20251204034843/https://www.wired.com/story/ruby-is-not-a-serious-programming-language/

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[–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

Eh. Almost every tool has its place. I use Python for all my automation needs, a niche in which it serves perfectly well. Surely you wouldn't argue that Rust or C++ would be a more appropriate alternative in that kind of role because they're statically typed. Then there's other things - I enjoy having Jupyter Notebook on hand for rapid prototyping, sanity checks or quick testing of ideas, plotting etc. It certainly beats using Octave, at least in terms of ergonomics. Most of my recent C++ projects uses Python generated Ninja scripts as the build system, and so on. It is possible there's something out there that would serve those needs of mine better than Python? Sure, but if so, I don't think I know what it is.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Surely you wouldn’t argue that Rust or C++ would be a more appropriate alternative in that kind of role because they’re statically typed.

    Not C++. Rust hopefully, when cargo script is stabilised!

    Until then I strongly prefer Deno (which is also statically typed) for ad-hoc scripting. Python is surprisingly bad for that use case despite it being super popular for it because:

    1. There's no way to use third party dependencies reliably from a single-file scripts. You're limited to the standard library, or setting up a whole pyproject.toml, venv and so on.
    2. You can't import files by relative file path like you can in Deno, Zig, and Rust (sort of; it's slightly hacky). That leads to people doing hacks to PYTHONPATH or importlib which completely breaks all tooling.
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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    I agree that Python's handling of 3rd-party dependencies is cumbersome, especially for scenarios that would have otherwise been trivial. However... The use-cases I'm referring to in my context have no need for anything outside the standard library. I'm literally talking about using Python as a shell script alternative, more or less.

    ...Which is admittedly the lowest of bars. It's hard to be less ergonomic or more arcane than Shell script - unless one resorts to the Dark Arts of Perl or APL.

    This is the first time I've heard of Deno, but I'm not sure that having to install a 110Mb JS VM + runtime is more convenient in my context than simply using Python which is already guaranteed to available on any system I use and does all I need. Is Typescript a better language than Python? Perhaps. Does that matter for my use-cases? No, not really. I definitely wouldn't use Rust - or any other compiled language - for scripting. While I haven't had time to look at Zig as much as I'd like, I do adore the language so far - I can definitely see myself transitioning from C++ to Zig, and likely will to the extent I'm able. Still don't see it as a Python replacement though (again, for my use-cases - I'm emphatically not arguing that there isn't plenty of projects implemented in Python that could have benefited from being written in Zig or Rust instead).

    If you have any other suggestions for viable alternatives, I'm open to suggestions though.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    This is the first time I’ve heard of Deno, but I’m not sure that having to install a 110Mb JS VM + runtime is more convenient in my context than simply using Python which is already guaranteed to available on any system I use and does all I need.

    I can assure you it is 100x more convenient. One command to install it that has worked every single time I've done it, vs the hell that is Python installation. It's meme-level bad..

    Granted that was written before uv existed, and UV makes things a lot better in general. One thing it still isn't great at though is installing Python. E.g. the binary Python distributions it can install never look for SSL certificates in the right (read: different on every Linux distro) places, so HTTPS doesn't work.

    If you actually want to install the latest version of Python on Linux (so you can't use distro packages), the official solution is to build it from source. Which mercifully is easy (very surprising given the rest of Python), but still!

    Is Typescript a better language than Python?

    Not uniformly (e.g. arbitrary precision integers are the right choice for ad-hoc scripting, and Python's support for lists, dictionaries, and filter/map is arguably nicer). Overall though, absolutely.

    I definitely wouldn’t use Rust - or any other compiled language - for scripting.

    Why not? It's really good for shell scripting type stuff (executing commands, manipulating files, etc.).

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