Comments on: Twitter, Ruby on Rails, Scala and people who don’t RTFA

By: Ikai Lan

Ikai Lan — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 00:31:13 +0000

Sigh. I wrote this like 3 years ago. I think my opinion has changed.

I think the thing about Lisp is the lack of a killer app. Ruby is popular because of Ruby on Rails, and so is Python. Clojure is kind of a neat tool but I have trouble getting a decent environment working. If your environment needs a Clojure expert to help you set up … it’ll probably fail. I think there are a lot of reasons why things do or do not take off, and a bigger part than is often given credit for is marketing.

By: James Fletcher

James Fletcher — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:45:22 +0000

Hi there. I came across your blog because i’m currently having to build a web app for somebody I know, so i’m googling random terms and got here. I’m a kernel programmer who does math, and rarely have anything to do with the web, so please don’t shoot me down if I’m mistunderstanding this..

The only comment I wish to make is about your DSL comment,
- “ruby is the most powerful with the best DSL support.”
well, i’m afraid that’s not true, Lisp is the most powerful and has been for 50 years.

My point isn’t to argue or anything, I would just like to know why people on the web don’t use it? It’s been available as a complete packaged solution for 10+ years now, the web could be self-automated with built in evolution by now.

Would feel honoured if you replied.

(btw i realise this post is old, but i did search the site for the word lisp, and there was no counts)
Many thanks, Jim.

By: Alex Zuzin

Alex Zuzin — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 04:08:19 +0000

It’s been a little while, so commenting might even be out of place, but talk of much ado ;-).

Alex had an unusual problem to solve, and picked a good tool for the job – a statically typed compiled language that’s almost as succinct as Ruby, and significantly more expressive.

Ruby and Rails are both great – they lowered the gauntlet on just how little effort things should require to develop. A significant number of projects saw light of day with less pain, and lived happily ever after.

On the technical merits, however, there’s no contest between a dynamically typed language and a statically typed one – they are in fundamentally different performance classes.

Rails is becoming less of an issue as well. Lift (liftweb.net) is already at 2.0. It’s just as tight-lipped as Rails, and easily outdoes it in security, Comet support, maintainability, and indeed suitability for web development altogether – web isn’t really an MVC environment, after all.

Anyway, to cut a longish rant short, it pays to dig below top soil. If you wish to have an opinion on comparative suitability of Ruby/Rails and Scala/Lift, get good at both, then compare. If Scala’s type system wrecks your brain initially (like it wrecked Steve Yegge’s, poor guy), consider it a mental fitness routine. :-)

By: Arne Bjarne

Arne Bjarne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:13:37 +0000

Hey Ruby folks. You should learn a little about the strengths of the other languages. Both Scala and Erlang have light threading and messaging architecture enabling above 10.000 concurrent connections. I think Erlang is stongest there. The functional paradigm enables high concurrency. Scala has the actor/model built in and was designed by the person that developed the first java compiler. It was made to scale.

Ruby can scale well, maybe… but was it created with massive concurrency in mind? Don´t think so.

How can you compete against the JVM with a dynamic language?

Still one can debate all night long if one really needs this performance if one can just add one more box, but then you are missing out on the point.

By: twitter trends api

twitter trends api — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:33:08 +0000

There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.

By: Y. Kamesh Rao

Y. Kamesh Rao — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:38:03 +0000

This was a really insightful article. A lot of points noted. Thanks a lot.

By: Timothy

Timothy — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:27:37 +0000

Hi Ikai,

After reading many articles on Twitter-Ruby-Scala issue, I summarize the comments as pro Ruby and con Ruby type.

Pro Ruby
——–
Most commenters wrote that Ruby on Rails does scale well and Alex could have done a survey for an open source tool for doing multithreading type operations and integrate it with RoR/Ruby

Con Ruby
——–
Alex as well as any one could have been carried away by RoR capabilities without assuming that Twitter needs more. When situation comes, any project leader would have done the same thing i.e., write essential parts in another language rather than scratch head on the dull capacities of Ruby

Thanks

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:19:36 +0000

“Ruby is probably the most powerful programming language on the planet for creating DSLs, or domain specific languages.” Hah! When you learn more scala you’ll realize that Scala provides a much safer way to create DSLs using implicit, as opposed to Ruby’s open classes. Plus internal and external DSLs are easy in Scala.

By: emil tin

emil tin — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:14:56 +0000

check out macruby – it’s a ruby implemented created by apple on top of the os x objective-c runtime, garbage collector, etc, and based on the 1.9 version. might have interesting implications for long-lived processes?

By: Isaac Gouy

Isaac Gouy — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:55:44 +0000

@Yehuda Katz > The benchmarks are the single-core results for the default combined score on the Alioth shootout

On the benchmarks game we can now see the range of measurements not just a single number.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&d=data&python=on&php=on&yarv=on&jruby=on&perl=on&python3=on&ruby=on&calc=calculate&box=1

@Yehuda Katz > doing a multiprocess (via fork?)

Just like some of the PHP programs now do?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&d=data&python=on&php=on&yarv=on&jruby=on&perl=on&python3=on&ruby=on&calc=calculate&box=1