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Posted by psxuaw 2 days ago

Ruby website redesigned(www.ruby-lang.org)
422 points | 183 comments
kshahkshah 2 days ago|
I used cursor over the past three weeks to update a 12 year-old Ruby on rails project. While it has been slightly updated throughout the years, this was my first proper modernization of the code base.

It’s been a real pleasure getting back into Ruby after so many years in typescript, python, and rust.

Happy to see the update. Real shame about the haters here, the Ruby community is a supportive and positive bunch that has shipped real products while others seem to worship at the altar of computer science alone… that’s about as counter snarky as I want to be here

scruple 1 day ago||
I spent ~16 years with Ruby (as a non-primary language for the first 5 years, but then as my primary for the remainder), from ~2006/2007 til 2022/2023. I had a couple of hours free to spin up new personal project this morning. At first I was going to default to Python since I use it heavily at work. On a whim, I decided to see what Ruby 3.4 has to offer since it's been a few years. I am very happy with that decision. I really miss Ruby the language a lot, it's such a joy to work with.
andrei_says_ 1 day ago||
Ruby is still a joy for me, too, and Rails continues to evolve while providing solid best practices as the default.

A side effect is an increased intolerance to agony, boilerplate verbosity, complexity. I look at the JavaScript world and shudder.

Also, Ruby being as expressive as it is, describing things to an LLM is not really a timesaver over writing the code myself.

DonHopkins 2 days ago||
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znpy 2 days ago||
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DonHopkins 2 days ago||
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periodjet 1 day ago||
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tovej 1 day ago||
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eudamoniac 1 day ago||
So everyone born in USA is a native American, right?
tovej 1 day ago||
Yes, they are native to the USA.

They aren't native american of course. That's a silly dishonest argument based on wordplay.

eudamoniac 1 day ago||
So why are they not "native Americans" but the people referenced in your quote are "native Brits"?
tovej 1 day ago||
[flagged]
TimTheTinker 1 day ago||
So using a term as an ethnonym for historically British ethnic people is racist?

If so, is it racist to assert or assume that ethnic Europeans exist?

periodjet 1 day ago|||
Social justice fundamentalism asserts that there are favored (“oppressed”) groups, and disfavored (“oppressor”) groups.

True believers have created a largely arbitrary grouping called “white people”, assigning it the “oppressor” label.

If a favored group’s nation were flooded by “white people”, that would be seen as an emergent situation requiring remedy; the opposite is what we’re seeing play out in societies like Britain, and is Not a Problem. I’m committing an act of violence by even describing it in this way.

How or when a disfavored group is restored to neutral or favored status is undefined; one would presumably have to consult a head priest of the movement for an answer (and I wouldn’t expect any coherence or clarity).

TimTheTinker 1 day ago||
It sounds like a Marxist structure with re-assigned labels.
tovej 1 day ago|||
What the hell are you on about.

"Native brit" does not identify a people the way "native american" does.

There is no entry in the dictionary for "native brit".

This is all I'm talking about.

Quit trolling.

TimTheTinker 1 day ago||
OP was trying to talk about ethnic brits, and I think that was clear from the context. He was then rebuked for that.
tovej 22 hours ago||
The OP was me. I pointed out how DHH's uses the term "native brit" to mean "white person" even though that is not the meaning of "native", which means you were born somewhere.
Kwpolska 2 days ago||
So many Web designers put zero thought into how their page looks when it is not loaded or not scrolled exactly past the trigger. So many sites say "0 happy customers", because someone thought showing incrementing numbers is cool. On this page, it opens up with a "100%" loading indicator, for a site that appears to have no interactivity that would require JS, just to show a pointless animation.
librasteve 2 days ago||
I am sure that the designers had to juggle a massive amount of community input and feedback and I know that this is not easy. Kudos to them for (i) leading with some very apt code examples, (ii) the 4 "whys" and (iii) the multilingual support.

Speaking from experience (recently we rebuilt https://raku.org), I am sure that they will come back and optimize, but tbh this is not the priority with a new site where the hits will top out at ~ 10k / hour.

I am no great fan of animations, simpler is better imho - and I have resisted requests to add a sandbox to the Raku site since https://glot.io/new/raku does such a good job anyway... but I think Ruby is likely to appeal to a wider audience via a cool design vibe, whereas Raku is still in the early adopter / geek phase of adoption.

btw Ruby is a fantastic language!

tempaccsoz5 1 day ago|||
I once tried to try Raku years ago, but I was left really confused by the website and docs.

Clicking through the code examples on your new website, I kept being amazed at some of the great things Raku does. It's night and day in understanding the uses and purpose of the language! Thank you.

Unfortunately, as soon as I click into the "introduction" section of the docs I'm abandoned to a wall of links and am once again lost. I'll try persevere this time, but I think you could do adoption of Raku a great favour by working on organising your docs site a bit more clearly. Astro's docs are an amazing case-study on best-in-class docs layout and writing: https://docs.astro.build/en/getting-started/

librasteve 1 day ago||
thanks I made a docs issue https://github.com/Raku/doc/issues/4739
trymas 1 day ago||||
> Speaking from experience (recently we rebuilt https://raku.org),

FYI, front-page has a lot of examples, that I assume change when switching tabs, e.g. "multi-paradigm" "strict-gradual" "interactive-mode", etc.

But nothing happens, neither Safari 18.6, nor Chrome 143.0, on macOS 15.5.

lizmat 5 hours ago||
FWIW, cannot reproduce on Safari 18.6 on MacOS 15.6.1
troupo 1 day ago|||
> I am sure that they will come back and optimize, but tbh this is not the priority with a new site where the hits will top out at ~ 10k / hour.

You don't need to "come back and optimize" if you don't start with needing a progress indicator for a "transform: scale" animation to display a single static download link. The number of hits is not relevant.

Neither do you need to do three separate fetch requests for static plain text examples that you then laboriously dump into the DOM by creating dummy elements, putting content in there, then looking up and cloning `code` tags to then dump those code tags on the page.

port11 1 day ago||
I think you might have an issue with modern frontend practices. That's okay, but there's a disproportionate amount of hate towards Ruby's redesigned page. And it looks perfectly fine. HTPP/2 parallel requests aren't that big a deal, all things considered.

The website looks cool to me, makes me want to try Ruby.

braiamp 1 day ago|||
He doesn't hate Ruby's redesigned page. He is complaining about yet another example of waste of resources that clients have to do because you want your page look "dynamic". Please, make sure and be aware were these comments are being posted, a site that it's both "dynamic" and doesn't require much resources from the client.
troupo 1 day ago|||
This is a page that appeared on HN front page news.

So what do you expect? People ignoring the frankly idiotic choices made that you now defend with "they will come back and optimize it"?

> HTPP/2 parallel requests aren't that big a deal, all things considered.

I literally see a progress counter that is for some reason required to display the most trivial animation to show ... a single static link. On a gigabit connection. All that takes up to two seconds.

On that same connection the same thing happen to three purely three static examples of code that somehow need up to two seconds to appear and to shift the entire content of the page.

Both are especially jarring on mobile.

port11 20 hours ago||
Hmm, I don't see it. The animation loads instantly for me on a cold visit. The examples were already there. I tried it in Orion and things were a bit slower, Firefox too. But still not the multi-second delay, and I'm here on a ~30Mbps copper line with some latency. (Thanks syndicus!)

That said, I've no reason to defend the page. It just didn't strike me as bad, but I can see how others are experiencing a bad page.

troupo 3 hours ago||
Here's mobile experience: https://youtube.com/shorts/LFIQeEL2S0U

The same is on desktop Firefox. For some reason youtube can't process the screencast for that :)

MrJohz 2 days ago|||
Yeah, I thought those code samples would run immediately, in which case maybe the loading would be justified (although surely very easy to avoid). Instead, they're links to a different page that has the same code sample and a link to run the code, meaning I need to press twice to see what the code does when it runs, which isn't a lot but is surely at least one (possibly two) clicks more than necessary.

That said, it's cool seeing some of those samples, because they're honestly not really what I expected. For example, I didn't expect the list subtraction to work at a set operation, so seeing that example gives me a feel for what sort of things I can do with Ruby code.

ModernMech 1 day ago||
> I need to press twice to see what the code does when it runs, which isn't a lot

I don't know the exact numbers, but the figures show you lose a high percentage of viewers with each click. So if you have 100 people who view the first page, 10 of them might click the link to the second page, and only 1 of them might click the link to the third page. If having customers view the running code is crucial, you'd want it on the very first page, above the fold.

firefax 2 days ago|||
I really like the 90s-esque aesthetic of sites like HN.

Low bandwidth, minimal in an artistic way.

I wish less sites would try to make them look like a wordpress from the early twenty aughts.

Elfener 2 days ago|||
You don't even need to do a certain aesthetic to make your website fast. Just send your entire content in the HTML, instead of needing extra HTTP requests for JS and then more HTML before having all the stuff for your first render.
firefax 2 days ago||
[matrix voice]

What if I told you that you don't need javascript?

elxr 4 hours ago|||
The early internet aesthetic is why, as much as I dislike the site's culture, I continue to use reddit + RES.

The UI, the minimal buttons, the tight paddings, the lack of pop-in, the complete lack of animations; these have all been essentially unchanged for the past decade. Even the dark mode colors look exactly as it did the first time I switched it on.

mb2100 2 days ago|||
It even loads the code snippets in separate HTTP requests :-( But the snippets themselves are really good! I'm going to update mine on https://mastrojs.github.io
zelphirkalt 2 days ago|||
Yep, and for such cases it is usually very easy to make it work properly, if only a web developer put a little thought to it. We have most or all of the tools we need in HTML and APIs to make it work regardless. Like for example for the happy customer counter one could easily have a noscript fallback, that uses the number one already needs to retrieve to show the animation, but puts it there immediately. Then, iff JS gets executed, one can still animate the shit out of it.

It is part of what distinguishes actually good web devs from move fast and break everything kind of people.

efilife 2 days ago||
The noscript would not be needed at all. The value could be the real one by default, then in js set to 0 and incremented
zelphirkalt 2 days ago||||
True, in this case even easier!

I guess I thought of noscript due to other cases I had recently, where I noscript-ed a whole workflow and displayed elements, that should never appear, when JS is running.

jarek83 2 days ago||
I like how it looks. I don't like to see how badly it is crafted tech-wise - not optimized images by size and deferring, JS for things that work natively in the browser, bloat of tailwind instead of nice clean and modern CSS.

Knowing ruby I can tell that the relaxed approach to the website does not correspond with sophistication in the language itself. If I wouldn't know ruby, that would be a put off for me, thinking that if they don't want to convince me tech-wise by their site, it might be similarly annoying to deep-dive into the language.

igravious 2 days ago||
> not optimized images by size and deferring, JS for things that work natively in the browser, bloat of tailwind instead of nice clean and modern CSS.

care to elaborate?

jarek83 2 days ago||
Sure:

- images: none are visible above the fold - all should be lazy loaded (like it is done with all conference images) and the pragdave.jpeg one does not need to be that large;

- JS: navigation toggle, including chevron rotation can be done in CSS using :has combined with checkbox/radio input. Similarly for header-navigation and theme-toggle (here combined with cookie store). Then toc.js - seems like something easy to do in the backend. Hero-animation - I haven't looked much through it but seems like at least some parts can be done in CSS;

- CSS/tailwind - well it would probably take less typing to do it just in CSS, the site does not seem to be that much componentized to benefit from tailwind.

MrJohz 1 day ago|||
I would generally caution against doing toggles with CSS. While it can be done, it often has surprising effects, and can be difficult to make properly accessible (for example in the case of opening the navigation, I don't believe it's possible to set the correct aria tags to indicate that the toggle is a button that is showing/hiding another element on screen).

Instead, for a brochure site like this, I'd rather have the links just always visible, because this is the reference site for Ruby and I imagine a lot of people find them by searching "Ruby", coving l clicking the homepage, and scanning for the link to the docs/downloads/etc.

Alternatively, if the show/hide feature is really that important, right now I would (a) explore whether it can be done accessibly using the new invoker API, so you don't need JavaScript at all (with a JS fallback), or (b) just do it in JavaScript directly, but with an accessible default if the JS doesn't get loaded properly.

But yeah, the rest I largely agree with. There's a bunch of stuff here that would have been simpler, and arguably also easier, if they'd taken a slightly different approach.

azangru 2 days ago|||
> Similarly for header-navigation and theme-toggle

The theme toggle has three states. How do you model this with a checkbox?

Elfener 2 days ago|||
Why does a site even need a light/dark toggle, when you can just use prefers-color-scheme in CSS, and the user can select that in their browser settings?

(Also, technically, alternative stylesheets can be defined in HTML, except every browser except Firefox removed it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...)

ameliaquining 2 days ago|||
Because being able to switch from light to dark mode by clicking a single button is a useful feature, and while it would be nice if operating systems provided this out of the box, many (e.g., Windows) do not.
azangru 2 days ago||||
> Why does a site even need a light/dark toggle, when you can just use prefers-color-scheme in CSS, and the user can select that in their browser settings?

Good question, especially since the Ruby site already does this by default. Perhaps the argument is that one of the two color schemes may be designed so poorly that the user may want to manually switch to the other one.

jasonlotito 2 days ago||||
Because as a user, I want to change the light/dark of your site, not every set, and not my OS. If you don't have a toggle, you are making assumptions that aren't accurate.
yawaramin 1 day ago||
I am assuming that if the user selected a specific brightness mode, they want sites they visit to respect that theme. Call me crazy but this seems like common sense.
gbear605 1 day ago||
I know some web developers think that that’s true, but looking at the average people I know, they tend to want different settings depending on the site. People don’t generally want computer-wide settings for darkmode.
collinvandyck76 1 day ago||
This is true, also for people immersed in this world. Sometimes the dark mode of a site is ass, and it's better to set a preference for that site to use light mode to make it more usable.
jarek83 2 days ago||||
It could be done with :indeterminate state (so key in a cookie would be absent or removed when switching), but I'd probably would do it with radios instead
SquareWheel 1 day ago||
Note that a checkbox's indeterminate state can only be set via JavaScript, so that lessens the elegance of a CSS-based approach.

I agree that using radios would be better. Or just prefers-color-scheme, which sidesteps the FOUT issue that often occurs when storing theme settings in localStorage.

bmacho 2 days ago|||
It's possible to have a 3-states CSS switch/slider that controls site theme. Google it or ask AI assistant.
markdown 1 day ago||
The decorative underlines under the headings on the home page are embedded as content (<img> tags)!!!

Amateur hour.

tyre 1 day ago||
I say this with love, compassion, grace, and all due respect: Who gives a shit?
markdown 1 day ago||
It's a website for web devs. Web devs give a shit.
ecshafer 1 day ago||
Ruby isn't necessarily for web devs. Ruby is popular for all sorts of business line applications. In Japan is popular for lower level programming. You can do game programming via something like Dragon Ruby. Sure its very popular for Rails, but you don't necessarily need to do web dev.
continuational 2 days ago||
Not long ago I was looking through programming language sites to figure out how to best introduce the language I'm working on.

ruby-lang.com stood out with a text in a big font:

Ruby is...

Followed by a paragraph about what makes Ruby special. I think that was an exceptionally simple and natural way of introducing something as complex as a programming language.

ModernMech 1 day ago|
"Programmer's best friend" is precisely the wrong thing to do though (it says nothing and only makes the reader confused. Are we talking about a language or a pet? I'm not looking for a friend.). They took a step back with that.

For reference this is the old one, which is much better: https://www.ruby-lang.org/images/about/screenshot-ruby-lang-... From: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/website/

The old one was better because it said something about what the language is and how it benefits the user. "Best friend" is not descriptive. "dynamic language with minimal syntax that is easy to read and write" at least tells me something about Ruby, its priorities, and value proposition. I'm very concerned about a language that claims it wants to be my friend.

port11 1 day ago||
Dunno, it's a comfy tagline. I never got into Ruby but it always feels to me like it's a really ergonomic and cozy language. Sure, the best friend thing is a stretch, but it's honestly a slogan. How many people land on this page with no knowledge of what Ruby is and will confuse it with an app to make friends?
ModernMech 1 day ago||
It sure is a comfy tagline, but because it doesn't really mean anything you could say it about any language, and it only works if you already know what Ruby is. It's not that anyone would confused Ruby with an app to make friends, but it doesn't really say anything about Ruby at all. As other pointed out, the page doesn't even make clear that Ruby is a programming language.
Alifatisk 2 days ago||
I like the new design, however, I strongly believe the website could've been optimized further and used much less JS. Opening the website with JS turned off makes the code examples not load and the front page freezes as "0%" loading.

What does it do exactly? It just fetches[1] to another part of site and retrieves static text[2] to be displayed. This part could've been kept as part of the html, no need for this artificial loading. It's not a webapp, it's a website.

1. https://www.ruby-lang.org/javascripts/try-ruby-examples.js

2. https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/examples/i_love_ruby

In this day and age, it is possible to have an appealing, responsive, lightweight website with no JS (maybe except for darkmode toggle).

lelandfe 2 days ago||
> used much less JS

The homepage loads 9.7kB of JS. Navigating to every single link in the main nav results in no additional JS being loaded.

The site is fine.

spiralganglion 2 days ago|||
This page doesn't need JS. It doesn't need a loading indicator for said JS. It could just be html and css, otherwise unchanged.
satvikpendem 1 day ago|||
Sometimes people want things we don't need. It doesn't need Javascript but it allows certain nice to have features, like instantaneous page loads.
Alifatisk 1 day ago||
> it allows certain nice to have features, like instantaneous page loads

Right, but I do not think this is the case here

self_awareness 1 day ago|||
Home pages: Ruby 4.3mb, Python 1.3mb, java.com 2.1mb, raku.org 360kb, typescript 2.1mb
lelandfe 1 day ago||
Yeah but them's highway miles. I have much less care about a site loading images than the stuff that makes the mobile nav work. Images are pretty!

For instance, here's Python's 144kB JS-powered homepage mid-load: https://imgur.com/a/OvYVAMS

And theirs doesn't even have any pretty images! That said, Ruby really ought to give those images a compress.

satvikpendem 2 days ago|||
I like instantaneous page loads after the initial first page load, which is what the JS does here. Hard to do so without it.
bmacho 1 day ago|||
I don't think that JS does any preloading. When I open the front page and I click somewhere it loads normally for me, and it downloads the whole page content, after my click (desktop, Firefox).
lieuwex 1 day ago||||
I don't see what JS code would provide this?
troupo 1 day ago|||
wat
bmacho 2 days ago||
Darkmode toggle can be (and usually is) achieved by CSS.
Alifatisk 1 day ago||
And the state of it persist across page loads or tabs?
bmacho 1 day ago||
No. It might, depending on what your browser does, but it's not in the web standard.

But you can have a button that saves your state when you enable javascript, and doesn't save your state (but still works) when you disable javascript.

edit: I think it is possible to save your state on the second click. So the UX is: you have 3 options with a slide. You click one of them, the page theme changes, and the option icon becomes a padlock. You click on it again, and the option is saved.

It seems to be a limitation that without javascript a single click can't change a switch and do something else--make a request to set a cookie. But you can do changing style on first click, then setting a cookie on the second. Here's a demo (written by Claude) (it doesn't work without server, just the HTML part) https://jsfiddle.net/r134vgo7/3/

elcapitan 2 days ago||
Meta, but it's kind of ironic that the main Ruby language website shows a "0%" Ruby symbol with javascript deactivated, and doesn't even show the code examples, which are all just links to some sandbox anyway.
chrisandchris 2 days ago|
It annoys me so much when developers think they can do it better and link with JavaScript. Interactions (like opening a dialog) witj JS - yes. Navigating to sites/positions in-site - that is just dumb. So many pages break the "open in new tab" behaviour with this implementation.
hessart 1 day ago||
Maybe it was vibe coded, considering that Claude is the #3 committer in the website's repo[1].

[1] https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/graphs/contributor...

Alifatisk 1 day ago|
Claude is on the list because some commits by users have "Co-Authored-By: Claude ...". Does not necessarily have to be vibe coded.
aristofun 2 days ago||
I don't know what others are complaining about here, it loads for me as fast as this HN, but looks nicer.
librasteve 1 day ago||
I thought it would be interesting to try the showcase examples in Raku (since I am always saying how good Raku's imitation of Ruby is)...

  - https://glot.io/snippets/he42jpfm27
  - https://glot.io/snippets/he42trx6w6
  - https://glot.io/snippets/he434b6ryj
Obviously Raku leans more to `{}` and `my $var` than Ruby - but otherwise I think it does a credible job. Obviously these are carefully chosen Ruby snippets to highlit its unique abilities in strings, "array math" and classes. On the string interpolation, I would say that Raku has the slight edge (and has the whole Q-slang for a lot of fine grained control). On the array math, I had to apply the (built in) Raku set diff operator ... so I guess that Ruby is a little more natural for this (rather quirky) feature. On the class stuff, again very close. Raku has much more powerful OO under the hood ... multi-inheritance, role-composition, punning, mixins, MOP, and yet is a delight to use in this lightweight way.
yawaramin 1 day ago||
For fun, I did the same for OCaml:

Ex 1

    let say = "I love OCaml"
    let () = print_endline say

    (* Requires linking in the 'str' library *)
    let say = Str.replace_first (Str.regexp {|\(.*\)love\(.*\)|}) {|\1*love*\2|} say;;
    let () = print_endline (String.uppercase_ascii say)

    let () = ignore |> Seq.init 5 |> Seq.iter (fun () -> print_endline say)
Ex 2

    module StringSet = Set.Make(String)

    let cities = StringSet.of_list [
      "London";
      "Oslo";
      "Paris";
      "Amsterdam";
      "Berlin";
    ]
    let visited = StringSet.of_list ["Berlin"; "Oslo"]

    (* Requires the 'fmt' library *)
    let string_set fmt v = Fmt.Dump.list Fmt.string fmt (StringSet.to_list v)

    let () =
      Format.printf "I still need to visit the following cities: %a\n"
        string_set
        (StringSet.diff cities visited)
Ex 3

  module Greeter : sig
    type t

    val make : string -> t
    val salute : t -> unit
  end = struct
    type t = { name : string }

    let make name = { name = String.uppercase_ascii name }
    let salute t = Format.printf "Hello %s\n" t.name
  end

  let g = Greeter.make "world"
  let () = Greeter.salute g
Obviously, OCaml is a much lower-level language than Ruby or Raku–notably, regex support is not as great, and we have to explicitly tell it how to print values of custom types. Still, I find its lack of syntax sugar makes it easy to read nearly any OCaml code I come across in the wild!
christophilus 1 day ago||
Man. Haven’t thought about Raku for a while. Does it have a good web framework these days?
librasteve 1 day ago|||
The leading web framework for Raku is Cro (https://cro.raku.org) . Cro has deep support for distributed architectures and middleware pipes and a nice templating language.

  my Cro $service; # geddit?
There are others, notably the more lightweight Humming-Bird https://raku.land/zef:rawleyfowler/Humming-Bird

Also, if you want a more opinionated, HTMX centric web application library, then https://harcstack.org was used to make the new https://raku.org site

yawaramin 1 day ago||||
See https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2025/03/30/the-harc-stack/
librasteve 1 day ago|||
that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while
mabedan 2 days ago|
Loading percentage in the middle? I haven’t seen one of those since Micromedia flash days.
mrcwinn 2 days ago|
Macromedia!
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