Depends whether one's interest in Rails[1] was because it was growing quickly and getting a lot of attention, or because it made developing Web apps quicker and

Depends whether one's interest in Rails[1] was because it was growing quickly and getting a lot of attention, or because it made developing Web apps quicker and much more enjoyable. The former is over. The era when a "Rails shop" (consultant) could grow quickly - often by delivering brand new apps to customers who asked for Rails by name - ended years ago. I don't think there's a current equivalent to this. For a few years, the interest in mobile apps was about as high as Rails had been, but that's past too. (It's not a language or framework, but… I think containers/Docker has had this spot for the last 1-2 years.) The latter is still true. Rails is still remarkably efficient in developer time. Moreover, a developer who enjoyed writing Ruby 5 or 10 years ago will probably enjoy it even more now. Of course, other languages and frameworks have also improved[2], but Rails is still competitive by these measures. One thing that has changed from "peak Rails": the importance of JavaScript and client-side, well, everything. For about 2 years, choosing a JS-centric stack often led to using Node. Since 2015 or so, I think server-independent frameworks (React) and languages (TypeScript) made other server frameworks competitive again. [1]: or Ruby, but not many people were attracted to Ruby for this reason [2]: Node gets a lot of attention as a "Rails competitor," but I think someone considering Rails for developer productivity and happiness would probably consider Python (Django) and more recently, Crystal (Lucky or Kemal) before Node.