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  5. Java vs JavaScript vs Ruby

Java vs JavaScript vs Ruby

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ruby
Ruby
Stacks46.0K
Followers21.8K
Votes4.0K
GitHub Stars23.0K
Forks5.5K
Java
Java
Stacks148.0K
Followers105.5K
Votes3.7K
JavaScript
JavaScript
Stacks392.3K
Followers284.0K
Votes8.1K

Java vs JavaScript vs Ruby: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In the world of programming, Java, JavaScript, and Ruby are popular languages with their own unique features and use cases.

1. **Language Type**: Java is a statically-typed language, while JavaScript and Ruby are dynamically-typed languages. This means that Java requires variable types to be explicitly declared, whereas JavaScript and Ruby determine variable types during execution.
2. **Platform**: Java is a platform-independent language that can run on any device with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), while JavaScript is primarily used for front-end web development and Ruby is commonly used for web development and scripting.
3. **Syntax**: Java has a more rigid syntax with strict conventions, whereas JavaScript and Ruby are more flexible and allow for more concise code with their simpler syntax.
4. **Inheritance Model**: Java follows a class-based inheritance model where classes define objects, while JavaScript and Ruby follow a prototype-based inheritance model where objects inherit properties directly from other objects.
5. **Concurrency**: Java has built-in support for multi-threading and concurrency through the Thread class, while JavaScript and Ruby have asynchronous programming models to handle concurrent operations.

In Summary, Java, JavaScript, and Ruby differ in language type, platform, syntax, inheritance model, and concurrency support.

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Advice on Ruby, Java, JavaScript

Nick
Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

176k views176k
Comments
Ido
Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k
Comments
Brent
Brent

CEO at DEFY Labs

Mar 7, 2020

Decided

Node.js has been growing in popularity, and the ability to access the global pool of Javascript developers is great. There is a decreased amount of effort for people to work across the frontend and backend, and the language itself is easy and works well for many common use cases.

Go was the other serious candidate, but it just hasn't been implemented in as many Production systems yet, and the best Go engineers I've known have been hackers, whereas we're building a robust analytics platform that requires more caution. Type safety is easily added with TypeScript, and NPM is awesomely handy.

369k views369k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Ruby
Ruby
Java
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
23.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
5.5K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
46.0K
Stacks
148.0K
Stacks
392.3K
Followers
21.8K
Followers
105.5K
Followers
284.0K
Votes
4.0K
Votes
3.7K
Votes
8.1K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 608
    Programme friendly
  • 538
    Quick to develop
  • 492
    Great community
  • 469
    Productivity
  • 432
    Simplicity
Cons
  • 7
    Really slow if you're not really careful
  • 7
    Memory hog
  • 3
    Nested Blocks can make code unreadable
  • 2
    Encouraging imperative programming
  • 1
    No type safety, so it requires copious testing
Pros
  • 608
    Great libraries
  • 446
    Widely used
  • 401
    Excellent tooling
  • 396
    Huge amount of documentation available
  • 334
    Large pool of developers available
Cons
  • 33
    Verbosity
  • 27
    NullpointerException
  • 17
    Nightmare to Write
  • 16
    Overcomplexity is praised in community culture
  • 12
    Boiler plate code
Pros
  • 1671
    Can be used on frontend/backend
  • 1497
    It's everywhere
  • 1163
    Lots of great frameworks
  • 899
    Fast
  • 746
    Light weight
Cons
  • 24
    A constant moving target, too much churn
  • 20
    Horribly inconsistent
  • 16
    Javascript is the New PHP
  • 9
    No ability to monitor memory utilitization
  • 8
    Shows Zero output in case of ANY error
Integrations
Rails
Rails
Spring
Spring
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Ruby, Java, JavaScript?

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Swift

Swift

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

Rust

Rust

Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.

Clojure

Clojure

Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.

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