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Ruby

A dynamic, interpreted, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity
44.9K
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What is Ruby?

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
Ruby is a tool in the Languages category of a tech stack.
Ruby is an open source tool with 21.4K GitHub stars and 5.2K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Ruby's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Ruby?

Companies
5349 companies reportedly use Ruby in their tech stacks, including Airbnb, Shopify, and Instacart.

Developers
23774 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Ruby.

Ruby Integrations

Rails, Datadog, RubyGems, CocoaPods, and Auth0 are some of the popular tools that integrate with Ruby. Here's a list of all 294 tools that integrate with Ruby.
Pros of Ruby
605
Programme friendly
537
Quick to develop
490
Great community
468
Productivity
432
Simplicity
273
Open source
234
Meta-programming
207
Powerful
156
Blocks
139
Powerful one-liners
69
Flexible
58
Easy to learn
51
Easy to start
42
Maintainability
37
Lambdas
30
Procs
21
Fun to write
19
Diverse web frameworks
13
Reads like English
10
Makes me smarter and happier
9
Rails
8
Very Dynamic
8
Elegant syntax
6
Matz
5
Object Oriented
5
Programmer happiness
4
Elegant code
4
Generally fun but makes you wanna cry sometimes
4
Friendly
4
Fun and useful
3
Easy packaging and modules
3
There are so many ways to make it do what you want
2
Primitive types can be tampered with
Decisions about Ruby

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Ruby in their tech stack.

Simon Bettison
Managing Director at Bettison.org Limited · | 8 upvotes · 747.7K views
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In 2012 we made the very difficult decision to entirely re-engineer our existing monolithic LAMP application from the ground up in order to address some growing concerns about it's long term viability as a platform.

Full application re-write is almost always never the answer, because of the risks involved. However the situation warranted drastic action as it was clear that the existing product was going to face severe scaling issues. We felt it better address these sooner rather than later and also take the opportunity to improve the international architecture and also to refactor the database in. order that it better matched the changes in core functionality.

PostgreSQL was chosen for its reputation as being solid ACID compliant database backend, it was available as an offering AWS RDS service which reduced the management overhead of us having to configure it ourselves. In order to reduce read load on the primary database we implemented an Elasticsearch layer for fast and scalable search operations. Synchronisation of these indexes was to be achieved through the use of Sidekiq's Redis based background workers on Amazon ElastiCache. Again the AWS solution here looked to be an easy way to keep our involvement in managing this part of the platform at a minimum. Allowing us to focus on our core business.

Rails ls was chosen for its ability to quickly get core functionality up and running, its MVC architecture and also its focus on Test Driven Development using RSpec and Selenium with Travis CI providing continual integration. We also liked Ruby for its terse, clean and elegant syntax. Though YMMV on that one!

Unicorn was chosen for its continual deployment and reputation as a reliable application server, nginx for its reputation as a fast and stable reverse-proxy. We also took advantage of the Amazon CloudFront CDN here to further improve performance by caching static assets globally.

We tried to strike a balance between having control over management and configuration of our core application with the convenience of being able to leverage AWS hosted services for ancillary functions (Amazon SES , Amazon SQS Amazon Route 53 all hosted securely inside Amazon VPC of course!).

Whilst there is some compromise here with potential vendor lock in, the tasks being performed by these ancillary services are no particularly specialised which should mitigate this risk. Furthermore we have already containerised the stack in our development using Docker environment, and looking to how best to bring this into production - potentially using Amazon EC2 Container Service

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Pedro Arnal Puente
CTO at La Cupula Music SL · | 2 upvotes · 196.9K views
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Our command and event buses uses stomp as protocol, over RabbitMQ in development, and Amazon MQ in production.

Currently bus communicates Ruby and PHP based clients.

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Johnny Bell

When I switched to Visual Studio Code 12 months ago from PhpStorm I was in love, it was great. However after using VS Code for a year, I see myself switching back and forth between WebStorm and VS Code. The VS Code plugins are great however I notice Prettier, auto importing of components and linking to the definitions often break, and I have to restart VS Code multiple times a week and sometimes a day.

We use Ruby here so I do like that Visual Studio Code highlights that for me out of the box, with WebStorm I'd need to probably also install RubyMine and have 2 IDE's going at the same time.

Should I stick with Visual Studio Code, or switch to something else? #help

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Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 28 upvotes · 3.8M views

When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.

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Dale Ross
Independent Contractor at Self Employed · | 22 upvotes · 1.5M views

I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

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I'm working as one of the engineering leads in RunaHR. As our platform is a Saas, we thought It'd be good to have an API (We chose Ruby and Rails for this) and a SPA (built with React and Redux ) connected. We started the SPA with Create React App since It's pretty easy to start.

We use Jest as the testing framework and react-testing-library to test React components. In Rails we make tests using RSpec.

Our main database is PostgreSQL, but we also use MongoDB to store some type of data. We started to use Redis  for cache and other time sensitive operations.

We have a couple of extra projects: One is an Employee app built with React Native and the other is an internal back office dashboard built with Next.js for the client and Python in the backend side.

Since we have different frontend apps we have found useful to have Bit to document visual components and utils in JavaScript.

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Blog Posts

Nov 20 2019 at 3:38AM

OneSignal

PostgreSQLRedisRuby+8
9
4620
Oct 24 2019 at 7:43PM

AppSignal

JavaScriptNode.jsJava+8
5
946
Jun 6 2019 at 5:11PM

AppSignal

RedisRubyKafka+9
15
1632
GitHubDockerReact+17
40
36107

Ruby Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Ruby?
Python
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
PHP
Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.
Java
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!
Groovy
It is a powerful multi-faceted programming language for the JVM platform. It supports a spectrum of programming styles incorporating features from dynamic languages such as optional and duck typing, but also static compilation and static type checking at levels similar to or greater than Java through its extensible static type checker. It aims to greatly increase developer productivity with many powerful features but also a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax.
See all alternatives

Ruby's Followers
21135 developers follow Ruby to keep up with related blogs and decisions.