I’m looking for a programming language that can help me build a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux that’s not big but not small either. Additionally, I’d like to be able to build a website with the same language. I’ve been considering Ruby, Python, Golang and JavaScript. Python seems to be mainly used for scripting and ai, so I’m not sure if it’s the best fit. JavaScript has a lot of negative opinions surrounding it, while Ruby sounds interesting. Can anyone recommend a language that meets my requirements?
Ever tried to follow a large Ruby codebase like Gitlab? Absolutely nightmare. Not only does it not have type annotations, so you can’t follow code by clicking, but you can’t even follow it by grepping because Rubyists seem to love generated identifiers. Even the syntax of the language makes grepping worse, e.g. the lack of brackets prevents you from grepping for function calls like foo(.
You’re talking about rails. That’s like saying Kotlin is a terrible language because your only exposure to it is with something that decided to use Glassfish Webfly Swarm and Camel.
type annotations
You can literally follow code perfectly fine in an IDE like RubyMine. It actually works much better than Python because Ruby is incredibly consistent in its language design, while Python is an absolute mess (same with JS. Try opening a large Python or JS project in PyCharm or WebStorm).
No clue what you’re talking about with grepping though. Use an IDE like I said and you can literally just “Find all usages” or “Jump to declaration”, etc.
In any case, you shouldn’t be using any of these for large projects like gitlab, so it’s completely inconsequential. Saying something like “Java is terrible, have you ever used it for a CLI? It’s so slow it’s impossible to do anything!” is idiotic because of course it is. That’s not what it’s built for. Ruby is a scripting language. Use it for scripting. It kicks Python’s ass for many reasons, JS is terrible for scripting, and while you can use something like bash or rust, the situation is incredibly painful for both.
None of this has absolutely anything to do with the language design. You’re talking about language design and equating it to being terrible and then saying it’s because you don’t use any sort of tools to actually make it work.
You’re talking about rails.
Maybe other Ruby code is better, but people always say Rails is the killer app of Ruby so…
Use an IDE like I said and you can literally just “Find all usages” or “Jump to declaration”, etc.
That only works if you have static type annotations, which seems to be very rare in the Ruby world.
In any case, you shouldn’t be using any of these for large projects like gitlab, so it’s completely inconsequential.
Well, I agree you shouldn’t use Ruby for large projects like Gitlab. But why use it for anything?
