[HN Gopher] Programming with Nothing
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Programming with Nothing
Author : ivanvas
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-05-22 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tomstu.art)
(TXT) w3m dump (tomstu.art)
| ineedasername wrote:
| I've always had a vague interest in learning a bit of ruby based
| on reputation. But my (equally vague) impression is that it's
| past it's peak and on the downslope of popularity. Is this
| accurate? Is it still worthwhile to learn, or have other
| languages mostly supplanted it?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Given the syntactical similarities maybe learn Elixir?
| klodolph wrote:
| What value are you interested in getting from it?
|
| Rails is still a fantastic way to build a web application.
| Better than most of the Node.js server frameworks I've seen.
| Plenty of lessons to be had there.
|
| Ruby (and JavaScript) is also where we learned about the
| pitfalls of monkey patching. Or at least, the most recent place
| we learned about the pitfalls of monkey patching.
|
| Ruby is mature, like Python, Perl, and Java. You can find very
| reliable, well-tested libraries to perform almost any task you
| want in Ruby. These libraries have been through iterations,
| they've been redesigned and replaced with newer libraries over
| the years, and those newer libraries have matured, evolved, and
| become the standard way of doing things.
|
| In some ways it's a breath of fresh air compared to, say, Rust.
| I'm not trying to pick on Rust here, but it's just the nature
| of a new language that its libraries are not as mature or well-
| thought-out as the libraries for older languages. The library
| authors for Ruby libraries have time on their side, and it's
| interesting to see Rust libraries go through the evolution
| process all over again. History repeats itself. Library authors
| make the same mistakes twenty years later, or make completely
| new mistakes.
| ineedasername wrote:
| The value is more hobby-ish, I like learning languages with
| different syntactic structures, it builds out the types of
| abstractions that I can hold in my head. But I also like what
| I spend time on in this way to potentially have some
| practical utility if I ever needed to ramp up my level of
| knowledge quickly.
|
| But if it's libraries are matured as you say then I suppose I
| could easily learn a bit the next time I have to write a
| small utility or one-off project. It has a reputation for
| data processing so I could probably port a small python
| project to it to dip my toes in a bit.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Pure lambda calculus does scratch a weird itch I never knew I
| had. Someone recently made a super tiny language runtime based on
| these concepts. https://justine.lol/lambda/
| Koshkin wrote:
| Not sure if that's completely true, but I have read somewhere
| that Haskell is nothing but a little bit of syntactic suger on
| top of pure lambda calculus.
| leifmetcalf wrote:
| Haskell gets compiled to core
| (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-9.2.1/docs/GHC-
| Core....) which is pretty similar to lambda calculus, but it
| has some additions like literals, let expressions, and case
| expressions.
| JadeNB wrote:
| There's also Jot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_and_Jot).
| fredrikholm wrote:
| The talk version _[1]_ of this article, like all of Toms talks,
| is equally amazing.
|
| _1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUhlNx_-wYk_
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I ran into this article about a month after I started to self-
| teach coding, coincidentally in ruby. It probably ruined my
| career in a good way.
| convolvatron wrote:
| i really thought Church could have been mentioned with a
| reference before the epilogue
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(page generated 2022-05-22 23:00 UTC)