The derogatory and inaccurate use of “monkey patch” to describe adding methods to an open class identifies you as a Python advocate, so grains of salt applied, but:
I can’t speak for this particular Rails usage, but one of the most powerful things you can do with Ruby is build domain-specific languages without modifying the language itself. *This is a core feature of Ruby.*
The criticism you’re making is one of the Rails DSL — there’s nothing in Ruby preventing you from instead writing account.desposit(Dollar.of(100)).
Put another way: This is like people criticizing RISC-V for not having multiplication in the core ISA — they don’t seem to grasp that RISC-V is an ISA construction set. Ruby is a language construction set.
I think it’s much simpler than that. Ruby didn’t have good documentation in English until the mid-2000’s. Python was in use by the English-speaking world before the turn of the century. Documentation + you can generally understand it at a glance == total Python dominance.
Looking at recent Python code, it also seems like the simplicity is being lost in the rush to add features.
Dissenting voice here. I did not like the book. It's dark and unpleasant and contra other people here I don't think it speaks to any particularly interesting truths about how supposedly smart kids can be misled.
edited to add: I arrived at this opinion when I first read the book sometime in the early 90's, which I think is decades before the author's bigotry became public.
It’s really unfortunate that Apple’s blown gaming so badly. I built a mid-high range gaming PC during the first year of the pandemic. The awful software that PC gamers have to put up with, from the basic stuff like NVidia’s driver software updates that they seem to want to be a social network to the ASUS labyrinth of random apps + UI just to update various bits of motherboard support where it’s not clear what you actually need and what’s actually cosmetic to the MSI daemons to support RGB lights on RAM modules that cause some games to crash at launch Just Because.
Windows gaming is a real shitshow. But that’s where the games are. You can avoid running most of this crap. But you wouldn’t have to put up with it in the first place on the Mac, because there’s an assumed baseline of non-scummy software and vendors would get called out and shunned.
Note that the precipitating event was Wallace’s Fox contract coming to an end. This wasn’t ideological ragequit.
But this probably is a consequence of Fox having gone full Trumpy/facist (see: Tucker Carlson) and CNN willing to buy names for their new streaming service, which I think they correctly view as the future of live news (if there is a future outside of TikTok or TikTok-alikes).
It’s reasonable for people with center-right, centrist, or left-leaning politics to distrust Fox affiliates. Some of them are in fact still owned by the same company as Fox News.
TV network affiliates can be either independently owned or owned & operated by the network. Disney did not acquire either the Fox TV network or the Fox TV O&O stations in the recent Fox studio sale to Disney, likely because Disney already owns the ABC TV network and strategic ABC affiliates.
Not familiar with Raku, but that grep call seems like it would be quite a bit slower than the Ruby equivalent at runtime if it’s anything like a normal grep. Is there some magic there that would make that not so?
I understand your concern, but you're advocating for a form of security-through-obscurity. Data harvesting of this information is already available to bad actors. If information must be private for security reasons, it should not be in the public court records in the first place.
Kind of a tangent, but Ruby-is-slow was always contextual. Ruby was always hugely faster than complex bash scripts for the same task. If you value launch time, Python (at least through 2.x) was always slower from a cold launch compared with Ruby.
I don’t know specifically what this person was told, but there was low confidence before the turn of the century on the classic Mac OS side that the NeXT people would developer a consumer-grade OS capable of replacing classic Mac OS[footnote]. So there was ongoing speculative development on various things.
However, by Mac OS 9, Mac OS X was clearly where all of Apple’s resources would go, whether it was any good or not. Most classic work at that point moved to building bridges to OS X via Carbon. Mac OS 8.5 was the last chance to build major new features into classic Mac OS. None of the ongoing work then or later was on the scale of Copland or putting a new kernel under the OS or anything of that sort. Mac OS 9 was known to be a dead end internally, and nothing like that would have been funded.
Footnote: This skepticism was well-placed: arguably it didn’t actually happen until Mac OS X 10.4. (You can argue that 10.3 was usable — or say “but UNIX” — but I don’t want to hear from you unless you actually tried to support that version on the machines of your less tech-savvy family members.)
I can’t speak for this particular Rails usage, but one of the most powerful things you can do with Ruby is build domain-specific languages without modifying the language itself. *This is a core feature of Ruby.*
The criticism you’re making is one of the Rails DSL — there’s nothing in Ruby preventing you from instead writing account.desposit(Dollar.of(100)).
Put another way: This is like people criticizing RISC-V for not having multiplication in the core ISA — they don’t seem to grasp that RISC-V is an ISA construction set. Ruby is a language construction set.