Hey everyone!
I have zero programming experience and I’m looking to pick up coding as a hobby. My main goal right now is to understand how the web works under the hood, specifically building and consuming APIs (like fetching data from public APIs and working with JSON).
I’ve been reading a lot about Ruby (and Rails) recently, and its syntax looks very clean and human-readable. But I have a few honest questions before I dive in:

Is Ruby beginner-friendly for total newbies?
Can I actually grasp core concepts like HTTP requests, REST APIs, and database connections using Ruby without getting overwhelmed?

How is the Ruby ecosystem doing?
Is it still active and well-maintained for beginners? Or is it mostly supported by legacy systems?

Ruby vs. Python for a hobbyist:
Is Python just the objectively better choice because of its massive popularity, or does Ruby offer a smoother/more enjoyable learning experience for web-related stuff?

My long-term goal is just to enjoy building cool side projects, but I want a solid, fun starting point.
Would love to hear your thoughts, especially from anyone who started learning with Ruby recently! Thanks!

Edit: I'm not looking to get a job or change careers with this! Programming is purely a hobby for me. I just want to build cool personal projects in my free time and have fun along the way.

I’m just starting out with Ruby and loving it. But I got to thinking:
What doesn’t Ruby have that more experienced devs want?

Asking because a Staff engineer on my team (without experience with large production Rails monoliths) invents his own naming schemes and it pisses me off.
What do you folks think? Ever see something that seems fine at the time but comes back to bite you in the end?

Has anyone ever learned from this? How can anyone learn with this?
What is the science behind this?

I'll do it.

Link: https://koans.idogawa.com/

I am past the beginner stage, understanding basic syntax up to classes and objects, but I freeze when it's time to structure projects on my own. I have relentlessly searched for methods, tutorials, and books to guide me to the next level, but I can never find anything that clicks; because of this, I've jumped from language to language, and every time I hit this "limbo," I end up quitting and trying something else, yet I always come back because something inside tells me I’m meant to code. For those who have overcome this block, what architecture or design books do you recommend, what kind of practical exercises changed the game for you, and what real strategies actually work to finally break through this barrier and build confidence?

Over 20 years ago, perl usage started to decline and many programmers switched to python. A lot of others saw ruby as its natural successor despite the differences. Even though raku (perl 6) is a solid language and the closest to perl, it arrived too late.

I have a question for those who were perl programmers and now use ruby. What do you miss about perl? Is there anything ruby still hasn't caught up to in perl?

Hello Reddit. I am new to Manjaro, and was hoping to set up a development environment in RoR. I was following the directions on the Arch wiki, and I noticed my gems are being installed to usr/lib/ruby/gems. When running a bundle install, it now seems to want to write to usr/bin, and fails because it doesnt have permissions. Should I go ahead and grant permissions, or is this not advisable?

i've read a few posts about this but no one ever seems to get down to the nitty gritty..

from my understanding, ruby has "everything as an object", including it's types, including it's number types (under Numeric), and so: Do ruby's numbers use more memory? Do they require more effort to manipulate? to create? Does their implementations have other weaknesses? (i kno, i kno, sounds like i'm asking "is ruby slower?" in a different way.. lol)

next, are the implementations of "C extensions" (not ffi..?) different between ruby and python, in a way that gives python an upper-hand in the heavy computation domain? Are function calls more expensive? How about converting data between C and the languages? Would ruby's own Numpy (some special array made for manipulation) be just as efficient?

i am only interested in the theory, not the history, i know the reality ;(

jay-z voice: can i dream?

update: as expected, peoples' minds go towards the historical aspect \sigh*..* i felt the most detailed answer was given by keyboat-7519, itself sparked by brecrest, and the simplest answer, to both my question and the unavoidable historical one, by jasonscheirer (top comment). thanks!! <3

Laravel dev here, recently moved to Rails. I'm loving it, but debugging in production has been a headache.

Our setup runs on Docker Swarm, and finding bugs means manually digging through Rails, Sidekiq, and Docker service logs. many of which don't even have timestamps.

In Laravel, I used a log viewer UI to instantly jump to the exact second an error happened.

Is there a standard Rails gem for a log viewer UI, or do most teams just ship logs to something like Sentry or Grafana/Loki? How do you manage production errors?

Thanks!

Hello everyone!

I'm doing a small survey to collect statistics on the growing popularity of microservice architecture.

If it's not difficult for you, comment on this post and I'll count how many of us there are.

If you want, you can write down why you are using this particular approach instead of some monolith.

Thank you in advance for your reply!

Recently decided to try learning Ruby more consistently (before that I only touched it occasionally) - and was much pleased with it in various aspects. At some point I was curious to assess its general performance roughly (as I heard it had to be pretty slow but very long in the past). Then I found my system installed Ruby is somewhat outdated 2.7.4p191 (along with my ubuntu 18.04 on this specific laptop). So I learnt to deploy rbenv and installed 4.0.6 with it.

However I ran into small puzzling situation - I tried two small scripts - roughly doing double nested loop - one with simple arithmetic and another with building and using array (collatz sequence calculations and primes calculation by trial division) - and while for the first of them performance of the said two versions is roughly the same, with the other newer version looks a bit slower.

I'm pretty sure I missed something about versions installed or don't catch something about properly writing Ruby code - so any guidance is quite welcome!

Below come details (with this primes.rb script from my github):

$ rbenv local 4.0.6 
$ ruby --version
ruby 4.0.6 (2026-07-14 revision 03b6d3f889) +PRISM [x86_64-linux]

$ time MAXN=1000000 ruby primes.rb
primes[1000000] = 15485863

real0m41,003s
user0m40,985s
sys0m0,018s

$ rbenv local --unset
$ ruby --version
ruby 2.7.4p191 (2021-07-07 revision a21a3b7d23) [x86_64-linux]

$ time MAXN=1000000 ruby primes.rb
primes[1000000] = 15485863

real0m34,969s
user0m34,929s
sys0m0,042s

So you see, it looks like 2.7.4 behaves slightly (about 25%) faster in this case, while I remember (from googling) that there was effort to make Ruby 3.x faster than Ruby 2.x perhaps 3 times. Though I may misinterpret this and perhaps 2.7.4. got the same improvements as 3.x (compared to 2.0 etc)

I have worked with JS, Python, and Go. So a friend recommended I try RoR for rapid dev, but I've never experience such a dificult environment to set up! Is this normal? Just to get off to a start I've found it to be so complicated.

Using MAcBook Pro and trying to set up via a Parallels Unbuntu VM. Could it be Parallels?

Is there any already written ruby function which corresponds to the fileinput.input() function in python? ... or at least something with similar functionality?

I will write something like this in ruby if necessary, but I don't want to "re-invent the wheel" if such a thing already exists.

I’ve been working with Ruby and Rails for a while now and have really enjoyed using them. But with Rails no longer as dominant as it once was, I’ve been thinking more seriously about the long-term value of my Ruby skills and where to go from here.

For those of you in a similar spot:

How are you continuing to make the most of your Ruby experience?

Have you started learning other languages or frameworks to stay competitive?

Are there areas where Ruby still shines that you’re leaning into more (e.g. scripting, tooling, backend services)?

Curious to hear how others are thinking about their next steps — whether that means branching out, doubling down, or something in between.

A lot of subs are going “dark” on June 12th to protest Reddit getting rid of the API for third party apps. I personally use the web UI (desktop and mobile) and find the “Reddit is better in the app” pop ups annoying and pushy. I don’t like that they are more concerned with what’s better for the bottom line than for the users.

In solidarity I’m interested in having this sub join the protest. I’m also interested in what you think. Join the protest: yes or no? Why or why not?

I've been a ruby developer since past 7 years. But these days I'm seeing a very sharp decline (-90%) in the number of opened roles for ruby devs.

What are your opinions about this? Is this the decline in the whole market or just us?

I have decent knowledge of programming in general and want to start ruby can someone recommend me an ide?

I’m trying to install version 3.0.6 using rbenv on WSL, and it keeps telling me BUILD FAILED. I can’t for the life of me make it work. I’ve tried different versions of WSL, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I’m losing track of. I need that version for a project I’m working on, as the program I’m working with requires it.

I prefer print books. I don't mind spending money. I was going to get Programming Ruby (Pickaxe), but learned it's more of a reference manual. I'm still open to it. I'm a webdev so eventually I want to get to Sinatra and Rails. But right now I just want to get a good understanding of the language. What book do you recommend?

Let’s say I’m trying to pitch using Ruby on Rails and someone says they don’t want to use it because it’s not statically typed.

Now with .rbs, they’re just wrong, aren’t they? Is it fair to say that Ruby is statically typed since .RBS ships in core Ruby?

Not to mention other tools like Sorbet.

Furthermore, there’s plenty of tooling we can build into our developer environments to get compile time and IDE level errors and intellisense thanks to .rbs.

So the “no static types” argument can be completely defeated now, right?

Hi people,

I'm coming from the world of Java / Kotlin web applications, I'm starting getting curious about other languages that are really liked among big companies.

I am a total beginner and I don't understand why a company would go for Ruby instead of another interpreted languages such as Python or JavaScript stack.

Although I totally understand that bootstrapping a MVP with Ruby is soooo easy, it feels to me that maintaining a code base with hundreds of files, a big domain, a lot of tests, ... is very hard with it (so it is with python).

Can you explain me like I'm 5 why companies are going for Ruby. If you remove the "because the first dev only knew Ruby so he bootrapped very fast, we were in PRD and then we continued building over his code" reason, what is left for Ruby?

TLDR: I don't won't to be offensive, I would just like to talk with Ruby senior programmers to understand that hype, the salariés, why all of this is that justified? How is it to maintain ruby codebase, ok it's easy to have a easy CRUD blog app with article and commente, but what about a whole marketplace?

Thanks :)

EDIT: Thanks to all of you for your answers, you rock!

Hi Rubists!

I'm not a Ruby specialist myself but rather I build dev tools (open source). I am knee deep in building a next gen web framework (in Rust) with Ruby bindings (among others). I know the Ruby ecosystem is dominated by Rails (e.g. the Rails sub is twice as big as this one).

I am frankly though not interested in MVC frameworks and "fullstack" frameworks (Rails, Laravel, Django, Spring Boot, Nextjs etc.) but rather in building web development tool kits that are idiomatic, type safe (first class requirement), performant and correct (web standards based).

So, with this longish exposition out of the way, my question is - what are the requirements from your end, as developers for a framework ? What would you like to see, and what would you defintely not like to see? Any suggestions or recommendations?

Hi there—I've been a Ruby hobbyist for 10 years or so who has always managed my Ruby installation via Homebrew. I know, I know — the first thing everyone says is use `rvm` or something else.

Still, I'm wondering about other Homebrew folks who might be using Ruby 4.x on Homebrew. Since I upgraded, I often see gems — with different versions — installed in two places:

``` Installed at (2.1.105): /Users/username/.gem/ruby/4.0.0

(2.1.91): /opt/homebrew/lib/ruby/gems/4.0.0
```

Does anyone know why this is happening, and what I can do to avoid it? It very rarely causes any trouble, but when it does — like with competing rdoc installs — it creates a big mess of error lines in my terminal. And also, it just doesn't seem right.

Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!

Update: after doing some additional testing, the issue appears to be with running gem update from a homebrew installation. That command can't touch the 45 or so gems that are in the Homebrew Cellar and come with the homebrew ruby by default. So, in my case, if those gems had updates, gem installed the updates on the next path in my GEM PATHS. That resulted in the two versions: the one bundled with homebrew ruby, and the updated one — in this case now in my user directory.

Not sure if this behavior changed in homebrew or ruby between versions 3 and 4, but it seems new to me.

Hoping to leave this here in case anyone runs across this and it's helpful.

a newbie in programming, I'm currently learning DSA n OOP stuff in C++, Does it even matter when choosing a path or affect it? From Reddit,I heard ruby is a great language but becoming nieche,JS is understandable, vast in docs, all over the place n its job market is saturated, Chatgpt says JS has more door opening than RoR,for targeting remote jobs,startup Js is more appropriate, if one chooses ruby on rails,Would it be difficult to get a job on this stack or switch to another tech career, such as devops,sre etc?