Ruby's Weimar Moment: A Renaissance in the Ruins
Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby
In the wake of DHH's RailsWorld keynote, many saw a crisis. But the author sees a Weimar-like renaissance: PDF generation, once a wasteland, now has two excellent libraries (sghtmltopdf, stationery); Qt bindings, Shoes (as Scarpe), and Parquet support are all emerging. With LLMs handling the gunk, Ruby's artistic community is free to create again.
The old order had lost interest, nobody was in charge, the ground was shifting under everybody's feet - and that is precisely when the most interesting work got made.
- chao-
Mostly agree with José's tweet linked in the article: the effort required to make anything better is lowered substantially. For example, the primitives for Ruby concurrency to be good have been there for 3-4 years. Many long-established ecosystem libraries and conventions didn't adopt these newer tools, and I don't blame them for that. Many might have required breaking changes. Breaking changes are a tough sell for decade-old, stable libraries. Then for application teams, prior to agentic engineering, it would be a big lift to migrate large projects to a new set of libraries. But that's not the case anymore!
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.
- woodruffw
I used to write a lot of Ruby, so I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the language and community's future. I think it's a great language in many ways, and deserves more attention. I was never a Rails person and have long felt that the community was overly shackled to Rails, and it could be a very good thing for that to be shaken apart.
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.)
- goatlover
> I must admit that for a few days I felt very depressed about it all. Not about “AIs writing all the code” - that much is clear to me, and I do not lament the changing landscape of the craft
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.
- rdg1991
one thing that's really stuck out to me from this presentation is the Hey on a Raspberry Pi comment - that really strikes me as more of an indictment on how many people are actually using Hey. I know a single person who does and work for a heavy Rails shop with folks that love DHH. Pretty important to keep in mind with any of his grand proclamations around work/business/etc that 37S has maxed out at 50 or so employees IIRC, and that was pre-mass exodus.
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.
- asdffdasy
people will say dhh is being cancelled etc. but he always had very bad political takes.
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"