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Ruby seems to have a footprint on Hacker News disproportionate to its general popularity and TIOBE index. Why?

berfarah 9y ago
Ruby has one of the better communities among programming languages - disproportionate to its popularity. I wish more languages had that quality of discourse.
lstamour 9y ago
Rails, and possibly 37signals, was very influential to many folks about a decade ago, especially in the startup community, where Rails was seen as especially useful for prototyping or rapid, test-driven web app development. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-startups-use-Ruby-on-Rails https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-startups-use-Ruby-on-Ra... It’s popularity at this may have diminished with the rise of JavaScript, Go and alternatives but many folks still like and use Ruby, or at least would like to see it continue to improve and thrive.
farnsworthy 9y ago
From a different perspective, having worked on numerous Ruby projects for years across the private (startups to Fortune 500), nonprofit, and government sectors, spanning many locations with worldwide team members, I don’t see where Ruby/Rails isn't at this point—it’s seemingly all-pervasive. Similar to general hiring/salary surveys, I’m not sure that the referenced index is accurate.
abhiyerra 9y ago
Ruby and Rails have been around for about 10 years at this point. It is stable and for most websites it just works (up to a certain size). It is not as exciting as JS is now but people are using it to get things done since it is relatively mature and used a lot in startups. Likely why you see it referenced a lot here.
mwaitjmp 9y ago
Not only due to the popularity of Rails, Ruby has become popular for sysadmins as config management solutions such as puppet and chef are built on top of it. The resulting syntax is very ruby like, and in some cases you are even required to write a few ruby blocks here and there. It also has an amazing testing framework in the form of rspec, which can be used for much more than just testing Ruby code.
- ngsayjoe 9y ago
  Yeah, and i use Selenium with Ruby as well.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Do you Watir Webdriver, much nicer Ruby wrapper, or straight up Selenium?
    - ngsayjoe 9y ago
      Straight up Selenium.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Ruby seems to have a footprint on Hacker News disproportionate to its general popularity and TIOBE index. TIOBE index is a junk metric (I'm surprised so many technical people seem to buy into it; it's the worst kind of easy to get a precise number, hard to demonstrate that that number has any more than a very distant relationship to anything meaningful, kind of metric that, IME, tech people mock bad managers for buying into.) That said, Ruby’s got (via Rails and other web frameworks, and via various testing and admin tools) a very strong footprint in use even if it's no longer the hype-of-the-month.
flukus 9y ago
HN is not at all representative of the wider programming community. HN attracts a lot of people working for trendy startup companies and is very silicon valley centric, but that is a tiny portion of the programmers world wide who are much more likely to be working on a java project for a generic business than using the latest fad. TIOBE has it's issues but as a rough guide to what the industry is actually using I think it's in the ballpark.
look_lookatme 9y ago
Because Ruby has a footprint in the startup community that is disproportionate to its general popularity and TIOBE index.

Ruby has one of the better communities among programming languages - disproportionate to its popularity. I wish more languages had that quality of discourse.

lstamour 9y ago

Rails, and possibly 37signals, was very influential to many folks about a decade ago, especially in the startup community, where Rails was seen as especially useful for prototyping or rapid, test-driven web app development. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-startups-use-Ruby-on-Rails https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-startups-use-Ruby-on-Ra... It’s popularity at this may have diminished with the rise of JavaScript, Go and alternatives but many folks still like and use Ruby, or at least would like to see it continue to improve and thrive.

farnsworthy 9y ago

From a different perspective, having worked on numerous Ruby projects for years across the private (startups to Fortune 500), nonprofit, and government sectors, spanning many locations with worldwide team members, I don’t see where Ruby/Rails isn't at this point—it’s seemingly all-pervasive. Similar to general hiring/salary surveys, I’m not sure that the referenced index is accurate.

abhiyerra 9y ago

Ruby and Rails have been around for about 10 years at this point. It is stable and for most websites it just works (up to a certain size). It is not as exciting as JS is now but people are using it to get things done since it is relatively mature and used a lot in startups. Likely why you see it referenced a lot here.

mwaitjmp 9y ago

Not only due to the popularity of Rails, Ruby has become popular for sysadmins as config management solutions such as puppet and chef are built on top of it. The resulting syntax is very ruby like, and in some cases you are even required to write a few ruby blocks here and there. It also has an amazing testing framework in the form of rspec, which can be used for much more than just testing Ruby code.

ngsayjoe 9y ago
Yeah, and i use Selenium with Ruby as well.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Do you Watir Webdriver, much nicer Ruby wrapper, or straight up Selenium?
  - ngsayjoe 9y ago
    Straight up Selenium.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Ruby seems to have a footprint on Hacker News disproportionate to its general popularity and TIOBE index. TIOBE index is a junk metric (I'm surprised so many technical people seem to buy into it; it's the worst kind of easy to get a precise number, hard to demonstrate that that number has any more than a very distant relationship to anything meaningful, kind of metric that, IME, tech people mock bad managers for buying into.) That said, Ruby’s got (via Rails and other web frameworks, and via various testing and admin tools) a very strong footprint in use even if it's no longer the hype-of-the-month.

flukus 9y ago

HN is not at all representative of the wider programming community. HN attracts a lot of people working for trendy startup companies and is very silicon valley centric, but that is a tiny portion of the programmers world wide who are much more likely to be working on a java project for a generic business than using the latest fad. TIOBE has it's issues but as a rough guide to what the industry is actually using I think it's in the ballpark.

look_lookatme 9y ago

Because Ruby has a footprint in the startup community that is disproportionate to its general popularity and TIOBE index.