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After 25 years it seems Ruby is in gradual decline these days? You will find one ruby related post at HN after reading 500 of Javascript and/or Python posts her

by ausjke 8y ago

After 25 years it seems Ruby is in gradual decline these days? You will find one ruby related post at HN after reading 500 of Javascript and/or Python posts here for example.

loktarogar 8y ago
I don't think it's in decline, but it's certainly maturing - there's not so much "cool new stuff" to share about it anymore
- busterarm 8y ago
  If you go to RubyKaigi you'll get a completely different view of the ecosystem. On the other side of the world, Ruby has many adherents in the embedded development world. A large number of the Japanese talks are about mruby and that has motivated many of the last few years of the languages' improvements.
Rooster61 8y ago
I think this is more indicative of Rails falling out of favor that actual vanilla Ruby declining as a scripting language. Rails is Ruby's only real killer app framework, and it really isn't killer any more. It was pretty inevitable that enterprise Rails apps would go the way of the dodo once folks got wind of ActiveRecord's pretty awful scaling issues, and the fact that Ruby isn't overly performant compared to other popular scripting languages in and of itself. I think the focus on Python these days has more to do with the fact that it's often the language people learn first these days, and the fact that it has effectively supplanted Perl as the swiss army chainsaw of scripting languages. I think Javascript is popular due to the fact that it is essentially the native scripting/programming language of the modern web (or at least it will be until WebAssembly really catches on), and the ridiculous preponderance of decent frameworks that are out there now for that language.
- joelbluminator 8y ago
  Ever since the famous twitter drop out of Ruby/Rails many new enterprises adopted it. Gitlab, Stripe, Coinbase, these companis are worth tens of billions of dollars. I'm not talknig about the older generation (Shopify, Airbnb etc), but new successful companies that chose Ruby or Rails in the last 5 years. https://blog.planetargon.com/entries/18-companies-using-ruby-on-rails-in-2018 https://blog.planetargon.com/entries/18-companies-using-ruby...
ashelmire 8y ago
I agree with the other poster who says it's mature, not in decline (so maybe that's boring to the crowd that likes to always hop to the latest tech). Basically most of the kinks have been fixed and desired features have been added, and now it's about gradual improvements and adding new functionality as it comes. Students also commonly learn Python and Javascript in college and are probably more active on social media like HN. I think Rails is the obvious choice for backend apis these days. It's robust, takes care of most of the hard stuff, saves you time and mistakes. Use whatever you want for frontend (React for me) in tandem with it. Many of the job postings I've seen have listed Rails + React. It used to get accused of scaling poorly, but tell that to Github, Gitlab, and other large-scale sites with millions of users. It's true that bad Ruby is slower than bad Java, but the solution is to write cleaner code. I know this was all about Rails. I use Ruby for scripting work as well, and it's enjoyable to use.
- Rooster61 8y ago
  > It used to get accused of scaling poorly, but tell that to Github, Gitlab, and other large-scale sites with millions of users. I've worked on one such large-scale enterprise-level web app, and it really does scale poorly in some areas, specifically database management. ActiveRecord tends to get extremely expensive when db's take on large amounts of records and complex relationships start forming between those large tables. You need VERY good software engineering practices and understanding of which choices will utterly kill you down the line in terms of performance when using this ORM, and it's hard to see those consequences at the outset due to the fact that Rails code is so easy to pick up and understand.
  - taf2 8y ago
    Isn't this true of any language? I mean the language isn't what decides how you connect or build your sql queries? In rails I could choose to write a pretty scary join ``` User.joins("left join ponies on ponies.user_id IN (select id from foobars where user_id=users.id").group("so_funny").count ``` or I could have a policy to avoid joins at all cost and reject any commit that uses a join and get fun things like: ``` users = User.all # all fucking hell JSON.parse(HTTP.get("http://your-things.json"))['results'].select {|r| users.detect {|u| u.id == r['user_id'] } # for realz?? } ``` [edit]: cause formatting
VectorLock 8y ago
Its mostly dead. Except in certain shops that use a SVN monorepo.

by ausjke 8y ago

After 25 years it seems Ruby is in gradual decline these days? You will find one ruby related post at HN after reading 500 of Javascript and/or Python posts here for example.

loktarogar 8y ago

I don't think it's in decline, but it's certainly maturing - there's not so much "cool new stuff" to share about it anymore

busterarm 8y ago
If you go to RubyKaigi you'll get a completely different view of the ecosystem. On the other side of the world, Ruby has many adherents in the embedded development world. A large number of the Japanese talks are about mruby and that has motivated many of the last few years of the languages' improvements.

Rooster61 8y ago

I think this is more indicative of Rails falling out of favor that actual vanilla Ruby declining as a scripting language. Rails is Ruby's only real killer app framework, and it really isn't killer any more. It was pretty inevitable that enterprise Rails apps would go the way of the dodo once folks got wind of ActiveRecord's pretty awful scaling issues, and the fact that Ruby isn't overly performant compared to other popular scripting languages in and of itself. I think the focus on Python these days has more to do with the fact that it's often the language people learn first these days, and the fact that it has effectively supplanted Perl as the swiss army chainsaw of scripting languages. I think Javascript is popular due to the fact that it is essentially the native scripting/programming language of the modern web (or at least it will be until WebAssembly really catches on), and the ridiculous preponderance of decent frameworks that are out there now for that language.

joelbluminator 8y ago
Ever since the famous twitter drop out of Ruby/Rails many new enterprises adopted it. Gitlab, Stripe, Coinbase, these companis are worth tens of billions of dollars. I'm not talknig about the older generation (Shopify, Airbnb etc), but new successful companies that chose Ruby or Rails in the last 5 years. https://blog.planetargon.com/entries/18-companies-using-ruby-on-rails-in-2018 https://blog.planetargon.com/entries/18-companies-using-ruby...

ashelmire 8y ago

I agree with the other poster who says it's mature, not in decline (so maybe that's boring to the crowd that likes to always hop to the latest tech). Basically most of the kinks have been fixed and desired features have been added, and now it's about gradual improvements and adding new functionality as it comes. Students also commonly learn Python and Javascript in college and are probably more active on social media like HN. I think Rails is the obvious choice for backend apis these days. It's robust, takes care of most of the hard stuff, saves you time and mistakes. Use whatever you want for frontend (React for me) in tandem with it. Many of the job postings I've seen have listed Rails + React. It used to get accused of scaling poorly, but tell that to Github, Gitlab, and other large-scale sites with millions of users. It's true that bad Ruby is slower than bad Java, but the solution is to write cleaner code. I know this was all about Rails. I use Ruby for scripting work as well, and it's enjoyable to use.

Rooster61 8y ago
> It used to get accused of scaling poorly, but tell that to Github, Gitlab, and other large-scale sites with millions of users. I've worked on one such large-scale enterprise-level web app, and it really does scale poorly in some areas, specifically database management. ActiveRecord tends to get extremely expensive when db's take on large amounts of records and complex relationships start forming between those large tables. You need VERY good software engineering practices and understanding of which choices will utterly kill you down the line in terms of performance when using this ORM, and it's hard to see those consequences at the outset due to the fact that Rails code is so easy to pick up and understand.
- taf2 8y ago
  Isn't this true of any language? I mean the language isn't what decides how you connect or build your sql queries? In rails I could choose to write a pretty scary join ``` User.joins("left join ponies on ponies.user_id IN (select id from foobars where user_id=users.id").group("so_funny").count ``` or I could have a policy to avoid joins at all cost and reject any commit that uses a join and get fun things like: ``` users = User.all # all fucking hell JSON.parse(HTTP.get("http://your-things.json"))['results'].select {|r| users.detect {|u| u.id == r['user_id'] } # for realz?? } ``` [edit]: cause formatting

VectorLock 8y ago

Its mostly dead. Except in certain shops that use a SVN monorepo.