A very large number of SAAS products are built in (or started out in) Ruby, including these that I know of: Github, Gitlab, Twitter, Shopify, Stripe, AirBNB. Th

A very large number of SAAS products are built in (or started out in) Ruby, including these that I know of: Github, Gitlab, Twitter, Shopify, Stripe, AirBNB. There are more but those are the ones that come to the top of my mind. The engineers working at those places represent a non-trivial chunk of the software engineering world, especially in San Francisco, and SWE’s (especially in San Francisco) are a major cohort of HN readers. Additionally, the Ruby ecosystem had a major influence on many other ecosystems that spun out for various reasons. For example, Sinatra popularized the “minimal REST framework” and has been a major design influence on dozens of others, like ExpressJS and Flask. CoffeeScript, which established “transpile into JavaScript” as a thing, and profoundly influenced the shape of ES6, was heavily adopted and made prominent by the Rails team. Similarly notable projects like Ember, Elixir and Phoenix, were created by former Ruby and Rails core team members, Crystal is inspired by it, and plenty of older projects like SailsJS or Grails for groovy, etc. IIRC Rust’s cargo package management system and JS Yarn were also inspired by and contributed to by Ruby core folks. It’s influence is a lot bigger than its footprint. So Ruby is a nice, elegant language with a lot of influence in the software world, it’s used by many readers here, and a lot of people here have “warm fuzzy feelings” about it enjoy sharing and discussing interesting news or tidbits about it. That’s why :)