logoalt Hacker News

_dwtyesterday at 7:12 PM0 repliesview on HN

I have the strangest feeling that at some point this received a 's/—/...' pass.

That aside, while I'm "old" enough to remember this kind of cultural/vibe-based rivalry between programming language communities, and read enough to know it predates the greyest of living greybeards (TIMTOWTDI vs the Zen of Python, "Real Programmers Don't Write Pascal", "BASIC considered harmful"), I am not sure that this works any more as an argument.

It's a bit tone-deaf to suggest that the difference between Ruby and other communities is that Rubyists are the (only?) ones who care about "how code feels"; that's a pretty core part of the sales pitch for every PL I've ever seen promoted. I am actually nervously awaiting the first big PL that advertises on the basis of "you may not like it, but LLMs love it".

I suspect the real problem is that data science + ML/AI drove (roughly) a bajillion people to Python and LLM training corpus makeup will keep them there. Meanwhile all the Rubyists (ok, I'm being a little inflammatory) that cared about performance or correctness went to Rust (or had already left for Erlang or Haskell or Elm or... whatever). Who's left over there in the dynamic-types-or-bust Ruby world? DHH? (Not an uncontroversial figure these days.)