Ruby 3.4 Highlights (opens in new tab)

This is available in older Ruby versions by using the upstream `tempfile` gem version.

Kotlin also has it, I can tell you that it's really useful

Similar ish but equally cool is Nim's `result` keyword for functions. https://nim-by-example.github.io/variables/result/

Also damn Nim needs to do a much better job with their docs and site. `nim result` returns this very outdated third-party link first and nothing else official.

I constantly run into situations where I need to nest an iterator computation, and things like "it" get confusing.

I'm all for adding language features to avoid boilerplate, and it's clearly useful. I just want to call out that anonymous typing can be polarizing in large codebases and maybe only use it sparingly.

I've not been tracking ruby core discussions for ages now, but I could have sworn that exactly this was discussed and rejected a decade or so ago.

I was disappointed that "block parameter name" wasn't the ability to give a block an actual name that will show up in a stack trace. It's been an endless source of frustration when your stack trace is just a bunch of anonymous blocks and procs. I assume JS devs feel a similar pain with anonymous functions.

We already had "_1", "_2", etc., for inline block arguments. Adding "it" increases the surface area of the language without adding any new functionality. I think the underscored names are actually better for readability. They jump out at me, while "it" looks like every other variable name.

  items.map { foo(_1) }
  items.map { foo(it) }

I like “it” but it’s a shame it works only in single line blocks.

The Computer Language Benchmarks Game has some compared benchmarks:

Ruby+YJIT vs Python: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

Ruby+YJIT vs PHP: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

Ruby+YJIT vs Lua: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

I am familiar with ‘it’ as a default closure input from Kotlin. From a quick search, that in turns seems to be inspired by Groovy.

shame about that example, since

    ary.grep /(j|sh)orts/

already exists, and therefore sells the standard library short. try this:

    terms = %w(foo? bar q**x)
    Regexp.new "\\b(#{terms.map { Regexp.escape it }.join ?|})\\b"

    #=> /\b(foo\?|bar|q\*\*x)\b/

and observe that it's at the margins of instant comprehension where syntax shorthands like "it" add value.

This has bothered me for decades, why was this ever the case to begin with?

Is the stack trace in the section "Clearer exception backtraces" actually from 3.4? It has mixed backticks and single quotes.

_1 is also a bit of a footgun. It becomes an array of all block params IF the block has an arity > 1 AND no other block param (e.g. _2) is referenced anywhere within the block.

It's an unusually half-baked feature by Ruby's standards. I think there was some hesitation about the name "it" initially, because "it" is an essential method name in rspec, and is used within blocks there.

FYI, one of my favorite Ruby idioms is to capture command output with `open(...){_1.read}`

  pp open("|ls -lh /usr/bin/ls"){_1.read}
  "-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 135K Aug 30 04:57 /usr/bin/ls\n"

or to quickly print tabular data

  open("|column -t -s \\t", "w"){_1 << tsv_data}

Did you know you were going to use Ruby before Applying? Just wondering.

I agree that `it` is unnecessary, but I'm really confused by the push for a type system. It adds a lot of clutter to a language that optimizes for expressiveness. I would prefer to work in something like Go, which is designed to have types, rather than awkwardly patch them into Ruby.

I think it's quite sad that Ruby is so associated with Rails. Ruby is one of my favorite languages and last time that I touched a Rails code was in 2017. Even in web dev Rails is not the only thing in Ruby, there's also Sinatra which is an elegant micro-framework for building HTTP APIs, similar to Flask.

Some projects that I remember that uses Ruby that are not related to web dev: Homebrew, Metasploit, Vagrant and Jekyll.

I also find Ruby very useful for shell scripts. I wrote a blog post about that some months ago, you can read it and the discussion about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40763640

Ruby is my go to language for short "fun" programs, as there are many places where it optimized for development experience (such as the new "it" feature). One of the committers, Yusuke Endoh, clearly understood the joy of coding in itself as opposed to being means to an end, and has authored a book on esoteric programming:

https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4774176435

Before Ruby, my preferred fun language was Perl. Ruby is like Perl but without having to type $ all the time. I have never used Rails.

Oh yes, Ruby is my go to language to use when I need to glue things together or when I want to automate tasks on my computer. It's such a pleasant language to use!

I think the reason it's not talked about a lot is mainly because Rails overshadowing it and because there aren't so much hype or controversies around it.

At my day job we use Ruby with Sorbet to stitch together a large number of data engineering pipelines. It's a good choice since we also often stand up small Rails apps to expose the results from those pipelines, so we can keep everything in one language. The fluent functional approach it enables is pretty nice for that business logic (but I would not want to do it without the gradual typing on top). We do find ourselves glancing over at the Python ecosystem with envy from time to time but overall it has worked pretty well. As I've gotten better with it I find myself reaching for irb for more and more one-off tasks in the shell too.

Yup, I wrote smartcard reader programs in it. Some of them talk to a http server using async-http. It can be used for anything that Perl or Python is good at, well maybe except data science because Python really shines there. And irb is massively useful for everyday tasks.

Yes! In practice it's a scripting language similar in vein to Python, and it's used for similar things.

It's actually the language of choice for a lot of OpenSUSE projects as well, like the Open Build Service.

The reason you don't here much about it is because of its maturity.

It's used for chef/cinc. I rather like that "recipes" use ruby with an edsl rather than yaml like ansible or salt.

Vagrant, chef, puppet and lots of other stuff is written in Ruby. It's also great as a scripting language replacing Bash, Python or Perl for any number of things. I write all my small, one off programs in Ruby.

I use Ruby extensively in ops scripting and text mangling, where it supplanted Perl for me around about the same time that Perl stagnated ca.2010-2015.

However, Ruby doesn't make sense to me as a general applications language (Swift & Kotlin have won me over from C++ & Java), or as a systems programming language (I'm still rusted on to C, pun intended), and I remain super ambivalent about Rails despite using it extensively to stick web interfaces onto things. That doubt is in large part because Rails frequently undermines the Smalltalk-ish heart of Ruby.

Sure. I use it for almost everything, because it's so pleasant to use.

Yeah, I use it for everything between 5-lines-of-bash and a needs-a-compiled-language. You almost never hear about it, because it's mature. No big controversies, no huge fuckups or new versions that break everything, just a steady trickle of improvements.

We use it for microservices that only deal with Json and avro. Of course, we do that on Rails for some reason I'll never understand.

Definitely, although Rails is its most common use

You might have heard about Metasploit.

You can already get rid of it with the freezolite gem. https://github.com/ruby-next/freezolite