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> It seems like Ruby is a bit of a small community to target Ruby is the 4th most popular language on Github: https://octoverse.github.com/ https://octoverse.g

by moe 10y ago

> It seems like Ruby is a bit of a small community to target Ruby is the 4th most popular language on Github: https://octoverse.github.com/ https://octoverse.github.com/ That's what you call "a bit of a small community"?

cookiecaper 10y ago
Yes? Compare with the StackOverflow jobs survey, where Ruby doesn't appear in the top 10 languages used by any type of professional: https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2016#most-popular-technologies-per-occupation https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2016#most-popular-... . To be fair, it does appear in slot 9 out of 10 in the general "Most Popular Technologies" tab for 2016. I'm not trying to say Ruby is a niche language that no one has ever heard of, but it seems like a community on the decline to me. Since, IMO, Ruby doesn't really offer anything special and has always been more style than substance, and since there's clearly already an exodus out of Ruby and into other technologies like TypeScript and Python, showing that Ruby doesn't have staying power, it just seems weird to start a new thing based on something in that type of predicament. I'm not saying it's bad to start something based on Ruby if that's what you want to do, I just don't get it.
- vidarh 10y ago
  In my experience, StackOverflow rarely to ever comes up when I am looking for solutions to Ruby issues, while I often visit it for other things. That might very well be a better explanation for why it doesn't appear high on the list for Stackoverflow. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying there's no reason to assume StackOverflow's audience is unbiased and representative. It doesn't rate on my top 10 list of places to go looking for solutions to Ruby issues. > and since there's clearly already an exodus out of Ruby and into other technologies like TypeScript and Python I haven't seen anything of that supposed exodus. The few Rubyists I know that have stopped using Ruby have moved on to things like Elixir, not TypeScript or Python. I find that an extremely odd claim to make. TypeScript to me is a total non-entity - I don't know anyone doing TypeScript anywhere. Not saying it's not popular, just that wherever it is popular is entirly outside of the sphere I work in. Python I come across, but again as a demonstration of how little our personal anecdotes mean: I see far more people starting Ruby projects than Python projects, and most of the places I come across Python, it is grudingly when working with third party code. At the same time I'm fully aware that there are niches where Python is far better represented than Ruby, but they don't often intersect with what I do outside of machine learning projects.
- moe 10y ago
  > Compare with the StackOverflow jobs survey Why compare a survey (things that developers say) with hard pull request data (things that developers have actually done)?
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Because hard pull requests don't necessarily mean wider adoption. It gets down to which projects are represented on GitHub v. other platforms and those projects' source management philosophies. GitHub is (or was, at some point) written in Rails and attracted the Ruby community early. Rails is developed on GitHub, as are many other major Ruby projects, including the Ruby language itself. Python is hosted on its own Mercurial repository (though it is shifting to GitHub later this year) and that community never had the tribal draw to move its development from things like mailing lists into GitHub. Patches are still handled on the Python bug tracker, etc. As for individual project source management, some projects will have all contributors with their private fork and have them make individual pull requests as part of the code review process, some will give a core of contributors direct access to make raw pushes, and so on. Because of not every project uses GitHub and because GitHub's unmanaged pull request object is not a reliable unit of measurement, it's better to trust a survey that directly reflects real-world observances than to make extrapolations based on an unreliable metric.
    - nopcode 10y ago
      The exact same argument applies to stackoverflow as well.

by moe 10y ago

cookiecaper 10y ago

Yes? Compare with the StackOverflow jobs survey, where Ruby doesn't appear in the top 10 languages used by any type of professional: https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2016#most-popular-technologies-per-occupation https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2016#most-popular-... . To be fair, it does appear in slot 9 out of 10 in the general "Most Popular Technologies" tab for 2016. I'm not trying to say Ruby is a niche language that no one has ever heard of, but it seems like a community on the decline to me. Since, IMO, Ruby doesn't really offer anything special and has always been more style than substance, and since there's clearly already an exodus out of Ruby and into other technologies like TypeScript and Python, showing that Ruby doesn't have staying power, it just seems weird to start a new thing based on something in that type of predicament. I'm not saying it's bad to start something based on Ruby if that's what you want to do, I just don't get it.

vidarh 10y ago
In my experience, StackOverflow rarely to ever comes up when I am looking for solutions to Ruby issues, while I often visit it for other things. That might very well be a better explanation for why it doesn't appear high on the list for Stackoverflow. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying there's no reason to assume StackOverflow's audience is unbiased and representative. It doesn't rate on my top 10 list of places to go looking for solutions to Ruby issues. > and since there's clearly already an exodus out of Ruby and into other technologies like TypeScript and Python I haven't seen anything of that supposed exodus. The few Rubyists I know that have stopped using Ruby have moved on to things like Elixir, not TypeScript or Python. I find that an extremely odd claim to make. TypeScript to me is a total non-entity - I don't know anyone doing TypeScript anywhere. Not saying it's not popular, just that wherever it is popular is entirly outside of the sphere I work in. Python I come across, but again as a demonstration of how little our personal anecdotes mean: I see far more people starting Ruby projects than Python projects, and most of the places I come across Python, it is grudingly when working with third party code. At the same time I'm fully aware that there are niches where Python is far better represented than Ruby, but they don't often intersect with what I do outside of machine learning projects.
moe 10y ago
> Compare with the StackOverflow jobs survey Why compare a survey (things that developers say) with hard pull request data (things that developers have actually done)?
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Because hard pull requests don't necessarily mean wider adoption. It gets down to which projects are represented on GitHub v. other platforms and those projects' source management philosophies. GitHub is (or was, at some point) written in Rails and attracted the Ruby community early. Rails is developed on GitHub, as are many other major Ruby projects, including the Ruby language itself. Python is hosted on its own Mercurial repository (though it is shifting to GitHub later this year) and that community never had the tribal draw to move its development from things like mailing lists into GitHub. Patches are still handled on the Python bug tracker, etc. As for individual project source management, some projects will have all contributors with their private fork and have them make individual pull requests as part of the code review process, some will give a core of contributors direct access to make raw pushes, and so on. Because of not every project uses GitHub and because GitHub's unmanaged pull request object is not a reliable unit of measurement, it's better to trust a survey that directly reflects real-world observances than to make extrapolations based on an unreliable metric.
  - nopcode 10y ago
    The exact same argument applies to stackoverflow as well.