Given how many fedi servers are out there, it's interesting to me that I can only find one written in Ruby. You'd think that a long running successful project would just naturally produce resources that other projects can use. But that doesn't seem to have happened.
Conversation
Notices
-
Embed this notice
Jenniferplusplus (jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Apr-2024 03:39:35 JST Jenniferplusplus -
Embed this notice
Matthew Lyon (mattly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Apr-2024 03:39:34 JST Matthew Lyon @jenniferplusplus At the risk of making my mentions useless,
IIRC they chose ruby because they thought it would make things easy to contribute to
I spent a lot of my early career in Ruby & have since moved on: Ruby, & Rails in particular, is not the silver bullet for “deverloper happiness” those who love it think it is
It is *very* difficult to build for rails in a way that’s suitable for anything but a CRUD app, & it forces design decisions that make it hard to extract things
-
Embed this notice
Matthew Lyon (mattly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Apr-2024 03:43:45 JST Matthew Lyon @jenniferplusplus I spent a bit of time last week reading through Masto’s source while trying to implement message signing for an implementation of the inbox on my static site + “functions”, and tailing through the key management code reminded me a lot of why I left that world behind
The thing to understand about rails is that it was designed for Basecamp, and things shaped like it, and in 2010 at least people doing rails would tell you your problem was a bad one if it wasn’t rails-shaped
-
Embed this notice
Jenniferplusplus (jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Apr-2024 03:47:16 JST Jenniferplusplus @mattly I'm no fan of Ruby as a language or ecosystem. Even less so of rails. I just think it's notable that Mastodon doesn't seem to have produced any local benefits for working with activitypub, or any of the other specs involved in real world federation. Or if they did, it didn't foster any kind of locally favorable micro climate, as it were
-
Embed this notice
Matthew Lyon (mattly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Apr-2024 03:53:58 JST Matthew Lyon @jenniferplusplus Go is attractive to a lot of people coming from interpreted languages or the JVM; it makes it dead simple to compile a binary & it’s designed for network plubming the way rails is designed for CRUD
Code gen isn’t rely useful if your data structures are already defined
Its *incredibly* hard to do something “clever” in Go; the language is straightforward & has a consistent style, making it a decent choice for projects with a lot of contributors with varying project familiarity
-
Embed this notice
Jenniferplusplus (jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Apr-2024 03:53:59 JST Jenniferplusplus For some reason Golang seems to be the most popular choice? Is it the code generation features? Because otherwise, I can only image that handling AP docs is absolutely miserable in go.
-
Embed this notice
Matthew Lyon (mattly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Apr-2024 03:58:33 JST Matthew Lyon @jenniferplusplus I think this is another facet of Ruby culture
early on in rails culture there was the joke that ruby had one obvious framework to go with while Python had three or four, so that’s why you should choose ruby; there are some other alternatives there now but most serious people left outright
rails also encourages designs that make it extremely difficult to extract some bit of logic for re-use outside of a rails context. Think of it like wordpress plugins, vs php/nodejs libraries
-
Embed this notice
Johana Linda Star (johana@chaosfem.tw)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Apr-2024 09:01:05 JST Johana Linda Star @mattly @jenniferplusplus When all you have is a Ruby hammer, every problem looks like a Rail.
-
Embed this notice