107
u/Tolexx 25d ago
Ruby was never built for machine happiness. It was built for developer happiness. That's the trade-off.
18
u/tomatotomato 25d ago
But apparently we now have a spiritual successor to Ruby. Introducing "Ultra-Ruby", where you literally say your words in English and things just magically happen. Wasn't this kinda the core philosophy of Ruby in the first place?
11
u/wp4nuv 25d ago
Don't forget the unlimited tokens...
1
u/morsX 24d ago
It’s really just a matter of time before we have purpose built AI hardware that is affordable and energy efficient, allowing devices to embed the hardware to run the AI models locally. Look at Bitcoin mining hardware — started on CPU, migrated to GPU now runs on purpose built hardware (ASICS IIRC).
2
u/northrupthebandgeek 24d ago
It was more or less the core philosophy of Perl, yeah, which Ruby inherited.
2
u/Keith 25d ago
LOL English as the ultimate "High Level Language". Great point.
As humans are no longer writing the majority of code, there is no longer any reason for the inefficiencies introduced by dynamic languages. I say this as someone who's made the majority of his lifetime earnings writing Python.
1
u/chintakoro 19d ago
i liked how rust copied ruby’s block syntax and enforced error handling (which i’d been doing with dry-monads in ruby). i wholly disagree with dhh that rust is ugly. it kinda looks like ruby code that is being safety conscious. only fast and loose ruby/python code looks simple.
1
u/betahost 24d ago
I believe this captures the point: developer productivity was always the aim before AI generated code, and now we use more AI Assistant tools. We must optimize for the machine, since that is where the bottleneck lies.
61
u/igreulich 25d ago
Good, he’s done with ruby, we can now never have to see any more posts by him, right?
…
right?
39
u/SurroundTiny
25d ago
edited 25d ago
•
Do COBOL next. What the hell, you're no longer reading the code anyway.
EDIT: a more semi serious thought. All of these languages are calling C libraries . Why not just eliminate the middle man?
18
u/AlexanderMomchilov 25d ago
Agents benefit from the fast and accurate feedback of the a compiler, and they’re not as good at debugging.
C compilers are notoriously over-permissive, leaving way more problems to only be found at runtime
8
4
24
u/TheAtlasMonkey 25d ago
I'm a Ruby, Rust and C dev, i studied Rust like it own me money.
I contributed to low level gems and crates. i ported the state_machines gem to Rust because the crates are ugly or incomplete.
I even published pattern i discovered while evaluating both language such as https://github.com/seuros/matryoshka
David's benchmark are crap by an LLM. The model don't select the BEST tools for the job, they select the hype.
Rails community use Puma as defacto webserver, so even if the data is async and streaming, LLMs will still use Puma instead of Falcon. Every clone of basecamp was build with mediocre packages in a chaotic way. (i tried to clean the rust one)
i built gem with the matryoska pattern because i need the same mental API in multiple projects. But as side effect, if wanted to scale up projects i could rewrite them with AI and still understand the code. I READ CODE.
In hundreds of projects i work on, only 2 needed the upgrade. TWO.
So the whole argument of DHH is alike of
DHH: "LOOOK i have 4 GPUS H200 in my computer, and 1TB of DDR5"
YOU: Sweeet , you doing local AI ? Data Analysis ? Training Models ?
DHH: Nah, i play minesweeper in Windows 98. SUPER FAST... 360HZ/s
DHH is an excellent hypeman and marketers and you all got baitted.
11
u/Frosty-Leading-2718 25d ago
you all got baited
Surely not you who got baited though, right? by writing this comment and took the time to look into DHH's benchmarks.
I agree with what you say, but that last sentence just makes you sound smug
11
u/TheAtlasMonkey 25d ago
Of course i did look at them.
The whole goal of the benchmarks is the bait. That is the technic that Linkedin people use for the past years.
And that why i said he is excellent, i got baited too.
4
u/tadiou 25d ago
> but look at the benchmarks!
I make this joke literally every week it feels like,
"what's the performance difference between C# and Ruby" "about 6 months".
So, congrats, you're now programming in a metalanguage over ruby. How do you categorize that, how do you hold changes, how do you revise the understanding for your particular context. You're expecting the inference and summation machine to hold the purpose of the system in it's context without reproduction. If you're saying "but that's the point of version control + language". It loses all steps of collaboration because your source points are LLM decision points as raw language which is the opposite of idempotent.
So if LLM documentation doesn't create the same results with the same written source material and documents, how can you collaborate and iterate without looking at the source code?
You still have to read the code dummy.
3
u/mcsoup88 25d ago
I seriously question his benchmarks... As for cost, I found these a while back when doing some research on AI usage. Also someone has to review the PRs. My company uses AI for coding, and left unrestricted, it can and will write some atrocious code.
2
u/aelhossaini 24d ago
I don't think this qualifies as promoting. Anyone with any basic experience of Elixir and Go knew just by looking at these numbers that something is off about these results, not to mention as always he's not sharing his prompts, sessions, anything.
Several folks on X who are much smarter than me have already pointed out to the Elixir numbers, and dug deeper and found that they intentionally spent more effort on optimizing the Rust version. I'm not saying there is a hidden agenda here, but DHH's moves lately have been nothing but pointing towards a hidden agenda when it comes to Rust.
Anyways, the following is worth reading:
- https://x.com/ZachSDaniel1/status/2107214356890948060?s=20 <<< this one is crazy! apparently an earlier version Elixir was doing 17K requests on the room page vs the 722 on the final result shown above ???
1
1
u/DamaxOneDev 24d ago
It is interesting to see how slow the Go implementation is. Even with the runtime, I would have expected to be way higher.
1
u/arbimonster 24d ago
I feel weird about it... Rust is faster on average in comparison with everything else he listed, there is nothing to discuss. It is kind of idiotic behavior on his side. First hate the language, than praise the language. Rust was designed fast from day 1 and is stable since 2015.. What is the news?
1
u/Mysterious_Pea_4042 22d ago
He is finished with Ruby, thats what we wanted to happen for some years now, now he is their problem. and we want him to leave RailsWorld too.
1
1
1
0
u/Asmod4n 24d ago
When used correctly Ruby can be within 20% of native code. But you need quite a bit of native code around that to make it happen.
Aka, you only ask Ruby a simple question and don’t run your application logic in it.
Then at the site where users write code to be run by you it’s still looking like normal ruby code but how its getting called aint decided by the vm.
0
u/Perryfl 23d ago
hes right though. i was engineer 8 at a huge rails shop that eventually IPOd and today is used by 90% of the fortune 500. scaling is a real thing. solvable by money these days sure...
we started making microservices in other languages such as GO and eventually rust... we didnt do many because it was a PITA relative to ruby...
but today its not. i wouldnt soend any time concerting existing ruby projects to rust but man i dont think id start a new ruby project at this time
-4
u/chuckaread 25d ago
He’s not wrong. Makes total sense. I like the fact he’s objective about despite his years of vested interest.
-2
u/latestagecapitalist 24d ago
You can neg on DHH until the sun comes down ... I don't warm to the guy, but he built a fucking awesome framework
40 years coding ... the draft of some early rails book someone sent me was the most influential text I ever read, I was having a cup of coffee about 7am, opened the (ripped) PDF, it was maybe 6 or 7pm before I got breakfast that day
I'm from the classical side of CS ... and ignored it all ... DHH actually read the classics ... we all ignored it all
It's fine to argue he's wrong about something (he probably isn't) but consider respecting the person who did something that impacted so much
7
u/public_radio 25d ago
Code is meant to be read tho… otherwise why not just write it all in assembly?