The actual Ruby for Good website has more information: https://rubyforgood.org/
Why does Ruby still have this artisinal aura to it, never seen C/C++ For Good gathering.
I volunteered a few years ago and had a great experience.
I’m glad to see conferences like this exist. It creates dedicated space for these focuses and the people who care passionately about them.
The only programming language I know of that is obsessed with trumpeting its own moral virtue. "Matz is nice so we are nice," "Ruby for good," dragging DHH, etc.
Meanwhile the Ruby Central and whytheluckystiff debacles show it to be anything but.
_why’s disappearance from the scene was 17 years ago at this point. I don’t think the Ruby community you’re talking about exists anymore.
Dude, what? Is it the MINASWAN acronym that's the problem or? If that's "trumpeting moral virtue", I can think of lots of programming languages that trumpet their moral virtue:
Let's check out the Rust Code of Conduct (https://rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct/):
"Please be kind and courteous. There’s no need to be mean or rude."
"We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic."
Seems pretty morally virtuous, no?
How 'bout Gleam... Right on their home page (https://gleam.run):
"As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.
Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t."
Seems morally virtuous, too!
Also also: what does the "whytheluckystiff debacle" have to do with any of this?! Also also also: _why was pretty much the first prominent "dragger" of dhh. Man was an innovator.
[flagged]
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.
Agents handle Ruby just fine. I used to have to give them some stern rules about avoiding instance_variable_get etc. instead of adding accessors, but those problems have pretty much vanished in the last 6 months.
I like using Ruby with agents because the code remains short and readable.
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.
[dead]
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 ...
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.
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.
There is almost no ceremony involved in dealing with types in Rust.
And what little there is, is worth it ten-fold for all of the runtime bug headaches that you avoid compared to dynamically typed languages.
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 like your comment is a bit tongue in cheek and i am going to take it at face value, but I honestly been feeling increasingly more like doing verbatim what you're suggesting and i dont have a very solid justification for it.
I meant it honestly. What excuse do people have to choose anything other than mission critical technologies if the AI system can do most of the heavy lifting? Why should we settle for anything less than five 9s of uptime?
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.
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?
Not sure about the compiler but prominent users of llm agents (Mitchel Hashimoto, Armin Ronacher etc) has mentioned that Go gives better results for agentic coding.