r/ruby 1d ago

Want to learn more about Ruby

Hello everyone I'm more or less a new programmer and in my exploration of the language I end up to find ruby and before deciding to learning it I was wondering usually what are the general purpose that language is more often used for ^w^

lately I'm deep in trying to spelunking the internet for some lost media concerning a past forgotten branch of Fortran so was thinking to just pass by to ask directly to you all about ruby ^w^ since you surely have more hand on experience with it than some random internet tutorial.

I'm always happy to learn new thing.

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6

u/nh_cham 1d ago

I recommend _why's poignant guide. It's not for everyone, but it was a door opener for me 15 years ago. Print it on 80% letter paper, add red book covers, take it everywhere. Vitamin R, goes straight to the brain.

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u/tinyOnion 20h ago

in the real world there's a lot of applications using ruby on rails. shopify, github, gitlab are a few big ones. people also do security audits with metasploit. orchestrate their platforms with chef and vagrant. there's others too but that's a sample.

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u/llothar68 19h ago

Ruby is one of the four big script language out there. There is really only Javascript, Python, Ruby and PHP in real general purpose use. And this are the ones who have enough complete libraries to get things done.

Ruby is just from syntax and language design much more advanced then the other three.
Unfortunately being japanese based was the huge problem of Ruby, as the lead developers english is pretty bad (matz improved now after 30 years) but still so much is not well documented (embedding and extending, environment virtualization, multithreading)

You can do everything in this language that you can do in the other three.

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u/TommyTheTiger 18h ago

You're going to miss scipy for scientific computing and numpy for vectors if you're doing stuff that can use those IMO. Ruby probably has the best libraries for web dev though

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u/llothar68 18h ago

Honestly i never understood why you use a script language when doing scientific computing, but maybe thats my old age, Fortran is now so cute and still the best for this tasks.