[HN Gopher] Programming with Nothing
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Programming with Nothing
 
Author : ivanvas
Score  : 62 points
Date   : 2022-05-22 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
 
web link (tomstu.art)
w3m dump (tomstu.art)
 
| ineedasername wrote:
| I've always had a vague interest in learning a bit of ruby based
| on reputation. But my (equally vague) impression is that it's
| past it's peak and on the downslope of popularity. Is this
| accurate? Is it still worthwhile to learn, or have other
| languages mostly supplanted it?
 
  | bryanrasmussen wrote:
  | Given the syntactical similarities maybe learn Elixir?
 
  | klodolph wrote:
  | What value are you interested in getting from it?
  | 
  | Rails is still a fantastic way to build a web application.
  | Better than most of the Node.js server frameworks I've seen.
  | Plenty of lessons to be had there.
  | 
  | Ruby (and JavaScript) is also where we learned about the
  | pitfalls of monkey patching. Or at least, the most recent place
  | we learned about the pitfalls of monkey patching.
  | 
  | Ruby is mature, like Python, Perl, and Java. You can find very
  | reliable, well-tested libraries to perform almost any task you
  | want in Ruby. These libraries have been through iterations,
  | they've been redesigned and replaced with newer libraries over
  | the years, and those newer libraries have matured, evolved, and
  | become the standard way of doing things.
  | 
  | In some ways it's a breath of fresh air compared to, say, Rust.
  | I'm not trying to pick on Rust here, but it's just the nature
  | of a new language that its libraries are not as mature or well-
  | thought-out as the libraries for older languages. The library
  | authors for Ruby libraries have time on their side, and it's
  | interesting to see Rust libraries go through the evolution
  | process all over again. History repeats itself. Library authors
  | make the same mistakes twenty years later, or make completely
  | new mistakes.
 
    | ineedasername wrote:
    | The value is more hobby-ish, I like learning languages with
    | different syntactic structures, it builds out the types of
    | abstractions that I can hold in my head. But I also like what
    | I spend time on in this way to potentially have some
    | practical utility if I ever needed to ramp up my level of
    | knowledge quickly.
    | 
    | But if it's libraries are matured as you say then I suppose I
    | could easily learn a bit the next time I have to write a
    | small utility or one-off project. It has a reputation for
    | data processing so I could probably port a small python
    | project to it to dip my toes in a bit.
 
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Pure lambda calculus does scratch a weird itch I never knew I
| had. Someone recently made a super tiny language runtime based on
| these concepts. https://justine.lol/lambda/
 
  | Koshkin wrote:
  | Not sure if that's completely true, but I have read somewhere
  | that Haskell is nothing but a little bit of syntactic suger on
  | top of pure lambda calculus.
 
    | leifmetcalf wrote:
    | Haskell gets compiled to core
    | (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-9.2.1/docs/GHC-
    | Core....) which is pretty similar to lambda calculus, but it
    | has some additions like literals, let expressions, and case
    | expressions.
 
  | JadeNB wrote:
  | There's also Jot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_and_Jot).
 
| fredrikholm wrote:
| The talk version _[1]_ of this article, like all of Toms talks,
| is equally amazing.
| 
|  _1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUhlNx_-wYk_
 
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I ran into this article about a month after I started to self-
| teach coding, coincidentally in ruby. It probably ruined my
| career in a good way.
 
| convolvatron wrote:
| i really thought Church could have been mentioned with a
| reference before the epilogue
 
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