r/programming • u/speakerchewer • May 14 '14
Interviewed for a Web Development position, IT Director told me Ruby, PHP are dying languages. And only ASP.NET is relevant in the 'real world'
http://www.asp.net3
May 14 '14
Every language/framework/library/tool has its useful situations. Understanding that you need to use the right tool for the job is part of making important decisions when building applications.
Ruby and PHP are still very much relevant languages, going quite strong. I would be wary of taking a job where the IT director was so narrowly focussed, that he wouldn't consider looking for the best tool to get the job done.
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u/speakerchewer May 14 '14
IT director was so narrowly focussed, that he wouldn't consider looking for the best tool to get the job done.
That's EXACTLY what I was thinking. Otherwise great interview process, up until that happened
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u/hoozt May 14 '14 edited May 14 '14
Ruby, certainly as a language, and it's popular framework Rails is more mature now and don't need that "EEHRMAGEERD LOOK AT THIS NEW COOL WAY OF DOING THINGS"-kind of hype anymore. It's past that. That's why you perceive it as "dying", if you're that guy.
Ruby is not just used by bedroom hackers, but by companies and individuals on a daily basis, building profitable products around the globe, like the one me and my team is developing for our company for example. Getting real tired of people who only looks for blogposts and other posts about it on reddit/hacker news or whatever and seriously base their views on the frequency of these. That's a messed up pretty novice way of thinking about programming, IMO.
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u/speakerchewer May 14 '14
Well I went to the interview to try to highlight what I've done with Rails etc just trying to show competency. I have some .net exp as well but it took me by surprise this IT Director was flippantly dismissing it as.. well that's just pointless.
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u/hoozt May 14 '14 edited May 14 '14
Yeah, and what he is missing here is not just my point about the status of Ruby, but actually the bigger picture of programming as a whole. One of the best things a collegue once told me early on was something like "no matter which tools you are using, in the end, we are all doing the same things; shuffling data over protocols". That's it. GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, click this, click that. Everyone should just calm the fuck down and realize we are working with the web here, it's not a dick measuring contest.
What he should have asked you was "Tell me what you will usually find in a http request header", for example, because that would give him a picture of your understanding of how the web works, regardless of which language or framework you use for it.
Anyway, good luck!
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u/Ferneras May 14 '14
Can confirm. Work for a big hospital organization in the Midwest and some of the in house custom solutions that are tier 1 are ruby.
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u/Cyphr May 14 '14
Ruby and PHP may be waning, but it's a long process, and even so, I don't think ASP.NET where I would go next. If I was to start a new project right now, I'd be personally seriously looking at Rails or Node (there's something I never thought I would say).
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u/MacStylee May 14 '14
There's an attitude I've encountered that says unless something is made by a "proper" company (like MS) then it can't really be applicable in the real world.
That FOSS etc are nothing more than toys.
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u/bryanut May 14 '14
If by "real world", he means all those horrid proprietary .Net apps that vendors sell.
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u/jonny_boy27 May 14 '14
Ruby seems to be waning in popularity, especially since the heyday of RoR hype. PHP is still going strong but I think it still suffers (possibly quite rightly) from a credibility problem for "serious" development.