Is ruby dying?
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Top comments (24)
"Is {LANG} dying?"
With the exception of a proprietary language that is discontinued by its maker, the answer to that question is basically always NO. Languages rarely die, they just become unfashionable (and, yes, sometimes no longer actively developed).
Better question: Is Ruby lang becoming less popular?
Better way of expressing the thought I wrote, deleted, rewrote, deleted, and pressed cancel on. +1
Yes you're right. Thanks
Always worth rehashing, but this was a previous similar discussion with a lot of good insight.
What's the state of Ruby? Is it trending down for good or just settling in to a mature niche role?
Ben Halpern
Some things have changed since then, but many haven't.
I think Rails is still used, but I don't know of a lot of uses of Ruby without rails, except Chef, which also appears to have gone out of favour.
As long as somebody keeps making security updates I'm sure it's fine.
Note that It's pretty popular in security circles (eg metasploit) and testing circles (eg selenium), and is occasionally used as a builtin scripting lang (eg SketchUp, this will likely increase as mruby matures). These just don't get much coverage in dev circles.
Ruby is a really pleasant scripting language. If anything, the weird thing people do with it is build production web apps.
It also seems to be in pretty good hands in terms of leadership at the top who understand its strengths and shortcomings. Ruby 2.5 had some really nice features.
Oddly, most of my exposure to Ruby was as a scripting language for doing admin and system things (prior to rools like Chef). I never actually used Rails. Glad I don't belong to that weird group. :)
Happily belong to the weird group, as dev.to is built on Rails. It's still a great ecosystem—but not necessarily because Ruby is perfect for this use case. It's just how things evolve and Ruby's place in the world relative to Java and co at the time that Rails started taking off. A lot of Rubyists at the time thought it was a really weird direction to take the language.
I think Ruby isn't as hot anymore, that's the difference. Just a "few" years back, Ruby was the hot thing people switched to from Python and from PHP. Nowadays, I think Ruby entered the stage where it's a long-term language to stay but it's definitely not the "hot" thing anymore.
I'd trust building a project in Rails as much as I would in Django or Laravel. All long-term players at this point.
63,557 new public repositories created on Github this year so far.
Other languages:
524,414 JavaScript
421,438 Java
376,781 HTML
272,477 Python
126,232 C#
126,044 PHP
125,494 CSS
105,807 C++
73,067 TypeScript
67,996 C
Yeah, but how many of those Javascript repositories are just forks of left-pad?
It's understandable that respondents who have only used Ruby for this or that (scripting or Rails) might be unaware of other uses for it, but their lack of experience doesn't amount to a general or objectively-meaningful assessment IMO. What's less understandable to me is that a simple, practical, and broadly useful tool such as Ruby would be superseded by the likes of JavaScript. OTOH historically marketshare has not always gone to the "best" tool in a given category. Think Betamax vs. VHS or Microsoft Windows vs. OS/2.
I don't know. I wouldn't bet on that.
I think Rails has a little stigma due to "size" and Ruby is not famous for being the fastest of languages. So if web development move closer to the client the need for a framework to rapidly prototype a web app is probably diminishing.
These days I only maintain a Rails app but most of new web apps are in Python + Flask unless there's a strong reason against it. The reasons being: Flask is nimbler than Rails and I know Python better than I know Ruby.
As @mortoray said I've never encountered anyone using Ruby without Rails (or a web framework in general) which is probably one of the reasons for its apparent decline. The biggest community has developed around web apps. I myself have only used Ruby with Rails and Cuba. If I have to write backend tools I write them in Python but that's just me.
It's still a great platform though, you can't go wrong with it and for most web apps the "scaling issues" have nothing to do with the programming language. The last great thing is that what you learn through Ruby/Rails can be applied in other platforms.
Why do you think it is dying?
I asked cos there was a debate on going in one of my whatsapp groups about the fact, its gaining popularity
Since the Ruby 2.x releases haven't been very exciting, other languages have attracted more developers in recent years. However there are (at least) 2 interesting projects in the Ruby world that might change the situation:
In the enterprise world the bridge to Java is always a very important argument, so the 2nd project might even be more important than the 1st one. However having a JVM implementation is no guarantee for success in the enterprise world. There are dozens of interesting JVM based implementations of other great languages.
My personal hope (for my pet projects) is to see the speedup in the next MRI major release and to get optional static typing (as seen in Typescript).
JVM scripting is typically used for different purposes than the MRI so I think the fate of the two is probably independent.
Re: #2, Closure and Scala are popular but are rather esoteric languages. Kotlin is the new kid on the block that is picking up steam quickly. In large organizations, it seems like Ruby familiarity alone would give JRuby an edge. On the other hand, developers love shiny new objects (languages/tools).
I think that ruby is gaining popularity; I have worked with node and I have worked with RoR and I have to say that if u want to rush to market, ruby is the way to go
No. Fullstop. ❤
Nope. It still gets updates, performance patches and bug fixes. I'd not call such a language a dead language.
Hmm.... ! I am just getting started to learn Ruby. Ruby should not die earlier man !