alt Hacker NewsMostly agree with José's tweet linked in the article: the effort required to make anything better is lowered substantially. For example, the primitives for Ruby concurrency to be good have been there for 3-4 years. Many long-established ecosystem libraries and conventions didn't adopt these newer tools, and I don't blame them for that. Many might have required breaking changes. Breaking changes are a tough sell for decade-old, stable libraries. Then for application teams, prior to agentic engineering, it would be a big lift to migrate large projects to a new set of libraries. But that's not the case anymore!
Ruby is never going to be a BEAM language or Rust, but I'm pretty excited for the near-term performance improvements in Ruby; not only the base language (e.g. Spinel), but in the broader ecosystem. When you avoid a handful of footguns, you maintain some basic architectural consistency/organization (and get your agents to do the same), Ruby continues to have a good balance between expressiveness, and the ease of reasoning about the code, relative to the amount of annotations and boilerplate you need to throw in to get there.
For someone who is persuaded they should never read the code anyway, then that's not a benefit that they desire, vaya con dios! There's not much conversation to have when working from such different premises.
I'm fairly torn about this, honestly. When I was reading the list of "why not"s in the tweet, I just found myself wondering the converse. Why put time into solving those problems - accepting that it won't require nearly as much time as it would have previously - when there are existing tools that already solve those same problems?
You do provide an answer to this question in your comment, in this sentence:
> Ruby continues to have a good balance between expressiveness, and the ease of reasoning about the code, relative to the amount of annotations and boilerplate you need to throw in to get there.
But is "it is easier to read" really enough of a benefit? Even accepting that it is true, it strikes me as a pretty fundamentally aesthetic judgment, and I'm just not sure that matters enough. And is it even true? I feel like after doing this job for a couple decades, I don't find there to be huge differences in legibility between the common high level languages. This is especially true now that I'm reading far more than I'm writing, and relying on static analyses to determine correctness, far more than on my own interpretation of the code.
When I first got into rails, what was awesome about it was how much boilerplate it could either generate or abstract away for me. But my sense is that boilerplate has just become way less of a problem over time... So I'm left unsure what the killer feature of rails is anymore.
But this argument applies to pretty much any framework for anything, and I still think frameworks remain very useful. But maybe they just aren't very ... interesting? But then if everyone comes to that conclusion, then it's even harder than it already was to have a community of people contributing to the frameworks and caring about their quality.
I don't have a conclusion here, just this stream of thoughts about it!