I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.
You can cheaply and readably give a lot of clues to both agents and humans with some assertions at the start of a method:
raise ArgumentError.new("...") unless ...
which can include type assertions but also a lot more. The agents seem to do well with this.
I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.
That seems like it would depend quite a bit on the project? I would think many nonprofits would want a webapp of some flavor, and Ruby (or Python) are still not bad choices there - my experience with Claude is that it handles Ruby well.
I’m downvoting because this is basically bait without any contribution as to why you feel that way, but personally I vibe coded a very successful result by iterating a rails app and then crawling the entire site into static files (~144,000 product pages and category pages) and then stashing them all in a bucket on cloudflare free tier.
I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.
Compiler errors help the chatbot find and fix problems. The equivalent in Ruby, RBS, isn't as widely adopted. Type annotations being in separate files is also inconvenient.
The actual Ruby for Good website has more information: https://rubyforgood.org/
I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.
You can cheaply and readably give a lot of clues to both agents and humans with some assertions at the start of a method:
which can include type assertions but also a lot more. The agents seem to do well with this.I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.
Why go halfway with Rust when you could just pick Ada SPARK? Seems like an arbitrary choice based off of rationalizing a trend.
Because you pick Ada Spark if are in a certification heavy environment like Aerospace.
I feel for a smallish project I'd rather prefer to have more readable, dense code like Ruby's over the ceremony of static types.
That seems like it would depend quite a bit on the project? I would think many nonprofits would want a webapp of some flavor, and Ruby (or Python) are still not bad choices there - my experience with Claude is that it handles Ruby well.
I’m downvoting because this is basically bait without any contribution as to why you feel that way, but personally I vibe coded a very successful result by iterating a rails app and then crawling the entire site into static files (~144,000 product pages and category pages) and then stashing them all in a bucket on cloudflare free tier.
I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.
The typescript team themselves rewrote the compiler in Go to get better use of coding agents.
They did it for speed, and Go was the language with the closest syntax to migrate to.
They started that migration years ago. I don't remember them citing agentic coding as a reason. Do you have a source?
I understand why rust, but why TS? just for a front end?
Compiler errors help the chatbot find and fix problems. The equivalent in Ruby, RBS, isn't as widely adopted. Type annotations being in separate files is also inconvenient.
https://github.com/ruby/rbs