Ruby is never going to be a BEAM language or Rust, but I'm pretty excited for the near-term performance improvements in Ruby; not only the base language (e.g. Spinel), but in the broader ecosystem. When you avoid a handful of footguns, you maintain some basic architectural consistency/organization (and get your agents to do the same), Ruby continues to have a good balance between expressiveness, and the ease of reasoning about the code, relative to the amount of annotations and boilerplate you need to throw in to get there.
For someone who is persuaded they should never read the code anyway, then that's not a benefit that they desire, vaya con dios! There's not much conversation to have when working from such different premises.
You do provide an answer to this question in your comment, in this sentence:
> Ruby continues to have a good balance between expressiveness, and the ease of reasoning about the code, relative to the amount of annotations and boilerplate you need to throw in to get there.
But is "it is easier to read" really enough of a benefit? Even accepting that it is true, it strikes me as a pretty fundamentally aesthetic judgment, and I'm just not sure that matters enough. And is it even true? I feel like after doing this job for a couple decades, I don't find there to be huge differences in legibility between the common high level languages. This is especially true now that I'm reading far more than I'm writing, and relying on static analyses to determine correctness, far more than on my own interpretation of the code.
When I first got into rails, what was awesome about it was how much boilerplate it could either generate or abstract away for me. But my sense is that boilerplate has just become way less of a problem over time... So I'm left unsure what the killer feature of rails is anymore.
But this argument applies to pretty much any framework for anything, and I still think frameworks remain very useful. But maybe they just aren't very ... interesting? But then if everyone comes to that conclusion, then it's even harder than it already was to have a community of people contributing to the frameworks and caring about their quality.
I don't have a conclusion here, just this stream of thoughts about it!
The performance issues here seem kind of a distraction. There is TruffleRuby and JRuby, which has been able to run Rails for a long time. If you want something faster than plain old Rails+MRI you don't need to rewrite everything in Rust to get it. You can get something nearly as good, while sticking with the Ruby you learned and understand well. And the code will be more token efficient and easier to review, as it'll be higher level.
It's always surprised me that language communities around Ruby and Python were never more concerned about their vulnerability on the performance front. So much great work has been done on alternative JVM based implementations, they were mostly ignored, and now well known advocates of those languages are openly arguing to rewrite everything in Rust just to get better performance - despite the large downsides of doing so. That was a huge missed opportunity and strategic misstep, IMO.
On the other hand, I find the comparison to Weimar Germany a little nuts. My association with the period is a little less Fritz Lang and a little more "paramilitaries terrorizing the Ostjuden." It feels strange to use this as the analogy for Ruby's revitalization, in no small part because of DHH's openly reactionary leanings.
(I don't think this comparison is ill-intended, I just think it doesn't produce the author's intended reaction.)
If you're not under pressure to vibe code for work, and you still like writing the code, I don't understand this sentiment. People coding on their own time won't be left behind. It's your own time to use as you like. And if you want to take a longer time to hand craft a library or your pet project, more power to you.
Sure, if you need help from the AI for something too difficult, time consuming or tedious, that makes sense. But the idea that everyone needs give up hand coding is absurd. This also isn't true for all paid programming work and will continue not to be, despite the marketing hype.
First, I offloaded the tedious. There was no real joy there. Then I offloaded the merely time consuming - after all I could have more fun on interesting problems.
But suddenly everything is too difficult, and I am not going to get any better at those pieces by glancing over ai prs. Still, this is what I do
I think we should write code by hand from time to time to not lose currency - but it's not the primary nor the default anymore.
Unfortunately (?) this seems to be the ground truth for the majority of people I speak to. What's not clear to me yet, is whether we'll stop reading code. I suspect that reading is going away as well. There's a push at $WORK to expedite 50-files/20,000 line PRs via agentic reviews..
If this continues, then language readability and "pleasure" of hand coding will likely diminish. I'm still not clear where we're going to land with libraries and re-use. Non-technical pressures are forcing functionality to be re-vibe coded instead.
I've always loved Rails for its pragmatic approach; I've delivered many projects with it. I'll be sad when it disappears but it seems inevitable.
What could possibly go wrong?
As far as I can tell, agentic software development (aka vibe coding) simply doesn't scale for lay people. At $WORK, I'm seeing the 5th version of the same small project being rewritten by execs. The 5th version is marginally better than the previous 4, but it still has major problems. 5th version has no CI and accesses 6 databases directly. These VPs are slowly becoming software engineers. It's hilarious to watch, but seems rather inefficient.
I've been asked this question by non-software people and the best answer I've come up so far is this. You can go to the hardware store and purchase a chainsaw. You can now prune small trees. This does not make you an arborist though. For reference check out YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=arborist+fails+...
Thoughts?
So, if anything, if the intent is "I can do it all myself and I will fire you now" - I love to see them stumble, if the intent is "I want to get my hands dirty and let's work together" - I will be happy to assist. It's not a pipe dream: it does happen.
If you are an exec building an app then the journey is likely to be uninteresting and an impediment to getting to a product. I don't think we'll uncover anything new here that we couldn't reason about before. When execs, or other non-programmers, do get decide to get involved, there is a probability that they will learn something more about software engineering inside their organization. That is the thing that software engineers need to be concerned about because depending on the circumstances, the execs will uncover things which shorten the tenure of SWEs or their management.
Tell me you weren't around for the dot com bubble without telling me.
At that point in time if you told any one you could build on the web they spent an hour pitching you their bad idea and then wanted you to build it for nothing. They thought the value was in the idea, not the implementation.
Now, if you have an idea, then go use AI to prototype, to validate, to iterate.
IF that results in a viable product then you need an engineer to go in and do the needed work to operationalize it. To attach testing, monitoring, deployment and more over cost metrics (something we have not really done in the last 30 years) - because a good idea that costs more to run than it makes is not a good idea.
The nuance is here - the "tweak this and we can save $0.50 a user a month" is how you move the needle at scale.
Programing is dead, Software development has a narrow place - engineering for sustainability, reliability and cost are what the field is going to become. Someone has to be responsible, or be on the hook for the 3am on a holiday weekend phone call.
That's another huge gap. Folks without software background cannot seem to grasp incremental improvement. This is why we're on v5. The solution to product's shortcomings is to start a brand new project.
I'm waiting to see if people start dropping massive trees on their houses, or if we're all arborists now.
Cost, latency, security, auditing, monitoring, operating.
LLMs can handle the functional requirements of “give me this output for these inputs” very well.
We don't necessarily like writing the code by hand, but those of us in this situation don't really have a choice and it pays the bills (handsomely, I might add; not complaining at all).
Every line of code has the entire organization behind it due to requirements that cannot budge an inch. There's also lots of rigorous manual testing beyond what is already automated. The automation efforts for this kind of software, sometimes going on decades, has left no stone unturned yet lots of human work (and payroll cost) remains.
This is what a real business looks like once it's settled into its competitive niche, and I'm routinely surprised how many devs on HN are not in this kind of role. Those people who are forced to lean hard on AI are at the highest risk of unemployment, and I have to assume they're either junior or made a lot of questionable career choices.
The strength of the Reality Distorsion Field would make the one of Steve Jobs pale in comparison.
I do hope he focuses less on Rails and lets others take it over more. It does do a lot of things really well, and it's incredibly easy to build stuff quickly on it.
now, he is fully in musk orbit, so i expect him to be even more polarizing when speaking publicly.
and ultimately, musk gave him a couple millions to sell grok (starting with full integration into his arch install script he calls a distro).
so, if you follow the money, it is pretty clear he is "just doing his (grok salesman) job"
Exactly this. I disembarked the DHH train way back in the CouchDB "perform like a pr0n star" scandal days. (If you don't know what this is, look up the article Smut on Rails by Martin Fowler)
Agreed. DHH is a promo-businessman now - may have always been that way, but it is very obvious to everyone now.
I think DHH needs to leave the ruby community. And the rails community as well.
One description I think that aligns somewhat with our current era is “technoplatonism”, which is my own coinage but I think is not wholly original after googling. They want to create an artifical philosopher king that is commanded by a small elite of capitalists. So it has elements of fascism but it’s also a bit different, more classical in some ways. Just straight repression of the working class without inspiring or mobilizing the petite bourgeoisie in great numbers (though the artificial prominence of AI boosters on X and other digital platforms owned by the rich is one attempt at this).
That is the part DHH does not get. Nobody will protect him from the gypsies (his words) if all are unemployed.
First, it has to be said that Ruby on Rails is not Ruby, in that the two communities at best are overlapping, but in reality, they are separate communities. I never managed to get into rails; I bought two books and did not complete either one. Despite all the promo, I always found rails horribly boring. I also did not see the need for it. At that point ruby itself already handled all my web needs (I wrote quite a lot of stuff in PHP; my latest project called "web", originally "cyberweb" when I was still using rubygems.org, came from the things I used and learned back then in PHP), so I never really fully understood the hype train. It took me a while to realise that this is how DHH operates - he is a business man first and foremost, not a programmer. He tries to build up hype. That's largely how rails got successful in the first place, in 2006 or so, give or take. So when he now promotes AI and Rust, I have a deja vu - he is on the promo tour again. (Note: I am not saying there is zero value in rails. Evidently there is, but I am focusing here on the promo, and DHH is a business man, not a programmer.)
> To me, it was the voice of a person in an existential crisis, but also a very jaded one.
DHH is annoying, but I don't think he is in any existential crisis. Now I think he lost the plot after his hate-entry against wolves, and casually linking shooting down animals to hunting down immigrants here:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
And no, I am not interested in any right-wing nuts trying to sugar-coat this. Before I used ruby I studied countless books about strategies (strategems, in particular chinese one, from Senger in particular), many psychology books too (various influence-centric books, both with a positive connotation and a negative one, e. g. "how to win friends and influence people", as well as the six core aspects of manipulation and so forth) - so I am not interested in white-washing campaigns about DHH anymore. His dislike of wolves showed it too clearly: he switched sides and is now on the Big Tech Bros side. This was already made clear when shopify rampaged through the ruby ecosystem - see how numerous devs were expelled by the ruby core team (Hiroshi Shibata, who acted under command by someone else, we all know that; and the reason for that move, was due to financial influx into the ruby ecosystem, which brings us back to shopify and its evil influence on the ruby ecosystem. byroot will soon say "no, we need more shopify companies!!!" - and while that has some logic in it, no, we really don't need MORE financial addictions and kick backs in the ruby ecosystem. Ruby needs more independent developers, and unfortunately it is now stuck in a death spiral. I don't see how it can escape it, even though ruby, as a language is really well designed - people need to separate the criticism, including criticism of DHH. DHH is a nut; ruby as a language is well-designed)
> “Look how I don’t care anymore, and you should not care either” is not a great message when you are the headline speaker at the conference - let’s call it CareConf - that you have, yourself, lobbied for.
The thing is: DHH's promo tour is logical if you connect the fact that DHH is now an AI promo agent. That's why he has no problem promoting Rust. It just sustains the AI agenda now. DHH is like a tool for AI promo. I pity the man - he is just a shell of his former himself now. He talked about things other than rails. You know all know that rails is dead. DHH did a post-portem here on rails. It's one of the more surprising things to witness. AI is the new rage - rails is dead.
> The message from the supreme leader was clear: we vibe-rewrote HEY in a more performant way, it worked great, we neither need nor care about Rails anymore.
That was not the main message though. The main message was that DHH joined the AI hype train. Rails is not relevant anymore. Even Omarchy is just a promo tool for AI. And, interestingly, the promo by DHH actually works. I am fascinated by that. Some of the clowns promoting it are paid shills clearly, but many people genuinely like Omarchy, for whatever the reasons. I don't fully understand it, but again, it reminds me of the rails hype. People LOVE hype. I don't know why; for me it never worked since I could not care less about what others are interested in (for the most part; I do "follow" some clever people. Follow is also such a strange word coined by antisocial media).
> he could have just left the toy he no longer loves - including its community - in peace.
But he is now an AI agent. So he promotes AI. He no longer cares about rails, that is true, but to him rails is a platform to promote AI. Same with Omarchy.
Big Tech Bros already pumped in millions here. It is a promo tool, similar to Anthropic claiming all problems in biology have been solved by claude (or will be, soon). They infect EVERYTHING now. It is the ultimate skynet slop. Just look at the ruby core team: claude is the main designer now. Does anyone feel like contributing to this AI slop? And, surprisingly: some people do. It's really interesting how AI changes people's mind. It's like in the old (two) movies Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But shit.
> But here is the thing: the rich and famous losing interest in the good stuff does not oblige the rest of us to. If anything, it frees up the room.
That is partially true, but ... can you generate as much hype and interest?
Many projects by solo devs fail here. Not everyone has the patience to do what, e. g. DHH does. You can dislike his methods but at the end of the day you will rate success somehow. One is by money. The other (or an additional one) is by interest by people.
I think DHH, as much as I think he is an AI tool, succeed in both. I am not interested in what this ultra-right nut has to say, but you have a bubble here of influencers and people listen to them a lot. Or, at the least, some do. Even matz said "I see no issue with blog entries of shooting down wolves and then randomly talking about migrants". Well, I have an issue with that, but it kind of means that politics and money infiltrated a lot of the discussion - on both sides, by the way. I am not so naive to assume that all criticism against DHH is genuine or honest either.
> It is abundantly clear that the LLMs are here to stay, that typing every single line by hand is no longer sustainable, and that the scales have shifted profoundly.
I disagree.
Ultimately via LLMs you become dependent on those who control LLMs. Not everyone wants that dependency.
And there is value for knowledge to be had regardless of LLMs as well. I agree that LLMs shifted the situation a lot in their favour, but I don't think AI skynet has won yet. You can find many people who really dislike LLM and are motivated to not get assimilated by the AI slop.
> What made me depressed was just how little care there was about the Ruby ecosystem and community, and the disdain with which David flushed the entire Rails and Ruby culture down the drain for the sake of “running it on a single Raspberry Pi”, as he put it.
That is true. It was clear when Hiroshi Shibata nuked all prior developers from rubygems.org. They built https://gem.coop/ in response - I am not sure how much momentum the latter has (remember that ruby right now is in-fighting more than gaining grounds, you can also see that on TIOBE, as bad as TIOBE is), but time will show.
This is not all DHH's fault only, though; neither only of Shopify. There are clearly people who never thought about the issue of money tainting an ecosystem, but it became more apparant the moment money became scarce suddenly. Why does a community need money, anyway? I am not paid by any of these companies. I don't want to, either. I want them to stop tainting the ecosystem via money and blackmail. Sadly shopify already tried so, and I think it is time to expel shopify from the ruby ecosystem as counter move. Unfortunately this alone won't really fix things; a lot of damage resulted from this. It'll take quite a while to recover from this.
> The “Roaring Twenties” of Weimar Germany also produced an incredible number of great, whimsical, fascinating artistic movements.
Ok he omits a lot here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic
Weimar lasted from 1918 to 1933. 1933 was when the Nazis already took over effectively in power. See Trump's ICE idiots trying something similar but failing hard (other than, of course, shooting down US citizens willy-nilly style - no civilized democracy would tolerate Sturmtruppen kill citizens like that, remember the ICE guy who stepped before the car, to have a casus belli to shoot; the other ICE guys stood next to the car. This is a 100% dead give-away of intention to kill someone).
So what did he omit? Well, the Nazis operate via psychology too, and people could feel a financial backlash and depression, in part due to reparation and other financial contributions they had to do, in part due to poor planning and execution of the government. The Nazis made everything worse, but they lied to the people about it, e. g. "we built roads like nobody did before", and many more propaganda shows. You can all read it up how they operated systematically via lies. I mean, the "Brausebad" disguise as gas chamber alone is a dead-give away. But people are easy to fool. So, no, the Weimar republic was not all that great. If it would have worked better than the Nazis would not have had a real chance. (They organised their coup well though: Night of Broken Glass in 1938 required those ~5 years or more. The time before 1938 is actually MUCH more interesting if you think about it. Hitler in 1938 already committed to war and eventual failure, but the main turning point came a few months before Stalingrad was cut off by the russian army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad - the loss came in 1943, but IMO the battle there on the whole front was already lost in late 1942. Stalingrad was just more the obvious defeat, but the defeat came mostly due to logistics issues.)
> I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after.
So he acknowledges how his own analogy is tainted. If Weimar worked so well, why would the Nazis have had success? Yes, people are stupid, you see it with Trump voters or ultra-right voters in Europe; many vote because of having lost in other areas, in particular the economy right now (very similar to 1933 in many ways), but the main point is that Weimar nowhere near as much was a success model as the author of the article tries to show. And I don't see why any of that has to do with DHH and his Kool Aid preaching style. I find it a lame style but that may be just me.
> Why, of all the things we now can do in Ruby, do we choose to do Rust vibe- > rewrites?
I don't. Then again I am not a DHH fanboi so ...
> It would be a pain to generate a PDF with layout - there were no libraries
Prawn was ok. hexapdf is even better. I regular try to get the hexapdf to improve the pdf-autogeneration part. Hexapdf is very good, so ... there were no libraries? Well, when exactly? Prawn is old: at the least 2008
https://rubygems.org/gems/prawn/versions/0.1.0
> You could no longer build native GUI applications - there were no libraries
Well, ruby-gtk worked, even on windows by the way. Since then it has decayed. My modifications of GTK core classes no longer worked. I tried to get kou to think about this problem some years ago. Nothing changed, all my old code is dead. So I decided to call it quits and no longer use ruby-gtk. Also because of GTK5 going to abandon xorg-server. I fail to see why I want to support their wayland-only crap future. Let's see whether this will succeed though:
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
and:
https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng
Granted, there may be a lack of developers for both, but do we really want to be locked down by corporate hackers that try to control the downstream situation? Both QT and GTK have this problem, for different reasons. I am absolutely tired of corporate shenanigans leaking into ecosystems and ruining them.
> And a lot of people would just throw up their hands in desperation and > utter The Spell Of Dread:
> Nobody does this sort of thing with Ruby anyway.
Thankfully I could not care what others say. Unfortunately, Ruby is also declining, and has been in the last years. There is no way to deny it. The numbers are strong here. If you google for "ruby is dead", you will find things such as "no, it is aging like fine wine". People simply try to deny the reality - that's interesting. But it is not an analysis.
> a Rubyist willing to produce PDF files from their Rails app would be facing a choice of a number of options, all equally unappealing
Interesting how he does not mention hexapdf. Now, I am not claiming hexapdf may be able to solve all rails issues here, but what is interesting is how he does not even know all possibilities in ruby. Is he a rails guy or something?
He mentions:
Gotenberg, Ferrum, Prawn and wkhtmltopdf.
I stopped reading there. IMO if you critisize DHH, and this is well-deserved after the damage he caused in the ruby ecosystem, followed up by him hating on wolves and then casually ... mentioning how immigrants are like wolves (I have no idea what DHH is thinking; I think he is roleplaying the promo-role and in reallife probably acts totally orthogonal to the crap he writes in general), then you really really need to be super-sound in all arguments. Be it the comparison to Weimar (and then kind of wanting to omit how Weimar in some ways, not all, but some, helped build up the Nazi idiots) or not knowing hexapdf ... I am sorry, but that means you failed at doing your prior research.
Personally I already find hexapdf to be better than prawn. And you can also try to convince the hexapdf author to improve hexapdf; he was willing to do so when he has time and the suggestion made sense.
Look how I don’t care anymore, and you should not care either
What DHH actually said:
I have AI delirium. AI euphoria. Because this is simply the most exciting thing we have made computers do in the time I have worked with them, played with them, interacted with them. But I think actually to wrestle with the fact that on the one hand, this is tremendously exciting, it is also a little unnerving.
and
There's only one play here, and it's total Fucking optimism. Lean in to the max possible. Because the utopia is almost here.
We might be a bit suspicious of the sincerity of a man who spent 20 years evangelizing the beauty and expressiveness of code, and who felt he was a pioneer in that field, and who then finds himself and his life's work completely obsolete, when he tells us how excited he is about LLMs never letting him never write code again.
Which stage of grief is "delirium"? After we accept the death of our child, are we euphoric?
I mean, he is kind of spelling it out for you there: "there's only one play here".
DHH is like a script that runs permanently in a loop, promoting AI now.
Before that it was rails, though the old rails promo made a lot more sense than the AI promo. But as long as you feed these people money, they do whatever you want them to say. An even more hilarious example is Sebastian Kurz - dude got insta-rich after politics. Like +100 million euros in a year. Tell me this is not corruption to the max ...
The AI companies and security companies buy legislation. Everywhere. And their financial kickbacks are AMAZING - otherwise you could not so easily change a few top-influencers into tools to influence other people.
> I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after.
to the extent where I'd almost say it's curious to draw upon this and not acknowledge the elephant in the room.
The nuance is of course that dhh is both correct and not exactly right at the same time, and doesn't really have any affect on you. Rails is still great for solo/small teams moving fast technically and product wise. He's also right that rust is good for established services (with possibly larger teams) that prioritize performance. Just as it always was, but now the transition from rails -> rust/others is much quicker with ai