Programmer Humor

Obligatory Tom Scott video

Complicated or not, the interfaces suck. And dont have to. And that's the problem.

timedelta marks time in days, seconds, and microseconds. It doesn't take leap years into account because the concept of years is irrelevant to timedelta. If you need to account for leap years, you need a different API.

The comparison is somewhat awkward, because the rails example presumably produces a date, while the python one is referring to an interval of time.
Just from the meme it's not obvious which was the actual intended use, so labeling either as inaccurate requires us to make assumptions.

Personally, the concept of "10 years ago" is a bit nebulous to me. If today is February 29th, is ten years ago March 1st? Doesn't seem right. Or particularly useful.

Because what's accurate here depends on the context, and the Python example doesn't hide that from the programmer.

The same dilemma goes for month calculations: does "3 months ago" mean 90 days ago, 91.3 days ago, this many days into the target month, or this many days from the target month's end (e.g. to account for 28, 29, 30, and 31-day months)?

Does the Ruby version do that though?

I haven't got it installed to check, but seeing constants like SECONDS_PER_YEAR in the documentation makes me think it's just as bad if not worse.

https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Duration.html

You probably use it everyday and didn't know it https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/building-github-with-ruby-and-rails/

I just started a new php gig

Yes

The handful of us have moved onto Crystal Lang. It's a statically type checked and compiled dialect of Ruby. Crystal is fun to write code, but the compiler is slower (compared to go-lang/rust)... because... well it's a ruby dialect (with DSL's)... and the 3rd party libraries are limited.

I had a coworker choose RoR for a major project despite the fact that he didn't know it, nobody on his team knew it, nobody at our company knew it, and nobody in the entire state knew it. It ended as one would expect, after three years and millions of dollars spent, with the only revenue it generated being $50K from the original client that had to be refunded to avoid a lawsuit.

Besides Crystal, a lot of people went to Elixir and Phoenix as well

Never use numbers when calculating dates. Use the data formats and constants the calendar library provides.

365.2425

Yeah its a rails only thing. Rubys biggest issue is its much too intelligent for its own good. Its implicit rather than pythons explicit. Most of the time. That and it's hard to find out where Ruby starts and rails ends.

That being said I made a ton of good money on rails back about 15 or so years ago. Still excellent for starting out.

LLM is saying...

Stop. Nothing at all past those three words is worth a damn.

Why?

Integers are just integers in ruby, with no structure backing them. They behave like objects, but only in some respects. You can call methods on them, but you can't extend individual numbers with properties for example (which would require them to have structure).

What you can achieve in a couple of pages of Python can be pretty spectacular. It's also mostly very easy-to-read, with the possible exception of class inheritance, which is confusing mess.

If you need to write more than a couple of pages, then its lack of types becomes a hindrance to me - doing refactors when functions can take basically any arguments is quite painful, for instance. Not requiring any particular structure is great, up until you start to struggle with lack of structure.

Ideal programming language for when you're wanting to do something that would be a bit too unwieldy for a shell script. It also makes network requests and json parsing very straightforward, so it's great for interacting with REST APIs and writing simple microservices. Fast to write and runs quite quickly, so a good choice for Advent Of Code-like tasks. Would probably choose a different language for larger projects or when working in a team, though.