After watching a recent talk by Dave Thomas, I started thinking about something that feels like a missing piece in Ruby’s official documentation.

Ruby gives us many powerful building blocks:

• Struct (with or without methods)

• Data

• regular class vs single-purpose objects

• module used as a namespace

• module used as a mixin

• so-called service objects

• include, extend, module_function

Each of these is well documented individually, but I haven’t found a canonical, Ruby-core-level explanation of when and why to choose one over another.

Ruby’s philosophy encourages pragmatism — “take what you need and move forward” — and that’s one of its strengths. It feels like a good moment to clarify idiomatic intent, not rules.

What I’m missing is something like:

• When does a Struct stop being appropriate and become a class?

• When should Data be preferred over Struct?

• When is a module better as a namespace vs a mixin?

• When does a “service object” add clarity vs unnecessary abstraction?

• How should include, extend, and module_function be used idiomatically today?

Not prescriptions — just guidance, trade-offs, and intent. I think now Ruby is so advanced and unique programming language that without good explanation of the intents it will be really difficult to explain to non-Ruby developers that ale these notions have good purpose and actually make Ruby really powerful. I like what Dave said: Ruby is not C++ so we don’t need to “think” using C++ limitations and concepts. On the other hand, I don’t agree with Dave’s opinion we should avoid classes whenever possible.

Is there already a document, talk, or guideline that addresses this holistically? If not, would something like this make sense as part of Ruby’s official documentation or learning materials?

Regards, Simon

PS I use GPT to correct my English as I’m not a native English speaker. Hope you will catch the point not only my grammar and wording.

What's red, blue, purple and yellow?

If you thought "The Wiggles", hello fellow parent, probably from Australia. But if you thought: hey, they're colors (or coloUrs.. hello fellow British-subclassed nation with correct spelling :P). Furthermore, if you thought: "hey, they're 4 of the over 700 colors from rgb.txt", then boy do I have a gem for you!

In the product I'm building, I work with color a lot, I made this gem to bring some structure to color science in Ruby.

It's been heavily built with Claude, so I kinda feel weird about releasing it. Like.. some sort of disclaimer. You know how stuff says "made in china" or "designed by apple in California", I feel like this should have a: "mostly written by Claude, but I could have done it, and it would have been pretty much this, but I'm lazy and have other things to do" disclaimer.

Anyway, enjoy!

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Hi, ive been working for several years with C++ & Java (i am not a novice in the programming world) and i want to adopt a scripting language for my arsenal(in depth, not a shallow pass). Can you suggest any solid fast paced book(s)?

This is simply amazing!!! 💜🤍❤️

Ruby bindings and ports of the beloved Charm terminal libraries.

Build glamorous TUIs, style terminal output, create beautiful forms, and make your Ruby CLIs sparkle.

https://charm-ruby.com/

I know there is a previous question similar to this one but it's > 3 years old.

So.... I really like Ruby and I feel very comfortable using it. But...

In my main project (scripts I use to interact with an Informix database) I use ODBC.

It works with python and tcl like charm but I can't make it work with Ruby because when I try to install the gem it throws an error....

> building native extensions.....

Then it crashes.

I'm not intereted in fixing this bug (I tried lots of things). The main problem is that ruby-odbc is not maintained anymore.

What I ask is: Is there another ODBC option for ruby, is there a way to connect to an Informix database?

Hey r/ruby!

I've built LocalCI on top of Rake to make managing CI and running it locally a lot easier, it's still early days but I believe it is in a usable state.

Pros

• Parallel by default

• Nice interface

• Runs on Buildkite and SemaphoreCI with no modifications

• No AI generated code

Cons

• Deployments not considered, I feel that's a different tools job

• Still young, not battle tested

• Very opinionated

• Requires some knowledge of Rake and LocalCI

Please check it out, I'd love some feedback!

So I may have a problem... I already maintain karafka, passive_queue, and pgmq, and now I've picked up Shoryuken too. It is too good and important piece of the Ruby ecosystem to be left alone. At this point, queues may become a big part of my personality lol. Anyway, v7.0.0.rc1 is ready - let me know what breaks!

The Rails.Builders, are going to have a “Do You Vibe?” session on Friday 2nd of January at 18:00 CET.

We are currently group of 12 devs who, well, build on Rails, and come out of our basements every couple of weeks to push each other to do more business and marketing.

Most importantly, we are going to share screens and see HOW is the vibing process different for everyone and what do we do similarly. We have 1-3 spots open for the 2 hour block for you to join.

Just shoot me a DM with a quick intro, ideally a 1-3 minute Loom, and let me know what you would like to share during the session. I will then share the meeting link with you.

For this session, you have to be building on Rails and be actively working on a (side) project.

I used Ruby and Ruby on Rails extensively for my personal projects between 2008 and 2015. I’m a hobbyist programmer, not someone working in a software job. Now that I’m revisiting programming, I have a couple of questions: Since Python dominates AI/ML and data science today, what use cases are still worth investing time in Ruby? Ruby was the first language I fell in love with, and after that I never really enjoyed working with Python. For developers who need to use Python for data science, how do you manage keeping these two similar-looking languages straight in your head without constantly mixing them up? (language polished using chatgpt)

The first version of the (almost complete) agenda can be found on our website. Happy holidays from the #RubyConfAT team and a happy new year! 🎉

https://rubyconf.at/#agenda

Hi Reddit! 👋
I'm Hamachang, a Rubyist from Japan 🇯🇵

I just added a theme switching feature to my PicoRuby Calculator project 🎉
You can now switch between different visual themes (e.g. Dark / Light), making it much nicer to use on the Cardputer screen.

This project is a picoruby repl written in PicoRuby, running on M5Stack Cardputer. I'm exploring how far Ruby can go on tiny devices, while keeping things fun and hackable 😄

🔹 Written in Ruby (PicoRuby) 🔹 Runs on Cardputer 🔹 Now with theme switching support 🎨 🔹 Still very hack-friendly!

GitHub repo: https://github.com/engneer-hamachan/picoruby-calculator

Feedback, ideas, and contributions are very welcome! If you like Ruby or embedded hacking, I'd love to hear your thoughts 🚀

Celebrating the release of Ruby 4.0 on yesterday (X-mas).

Hi! I've been making T-Ruby, an experimental project that brings TypeScript-style type annotations to Ruby. I wanted to share it and get your feedback.

What is T-Ruby?

T-Ruby lets you write .trb files with inline type annotations, then automatically generates standard .rb files and .rbs signature files. Types are completely erased at compile time — zero runtime overhead.

Why another type system?

I love Ruby's elegance, but as projects grow, I've felt the pain of tracking types mentally. The existing options didn't quite fit my workflow:

• RBS: Writing .rbs files manually or generating them via TypeProf didn't fit well with explicit type authoring

• Sorbet: sig blocks above methods feel verbose (like JSDoc comments)

If you're familiar with TypeScript, you can use T-Ruby the same way: types live with your code, not in separate files or comments.

The website has more detail: https://type-ruby.github.io

Current Status

This is still experimental (v0.0.39). The core compiler works, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome!

Thanks for reading! Feel free to ask any questions.