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The same argument can be made of PHP, COBOL, or even FORTRAN. None of this is changing the fact that Ruby has been on a sharp decline for a decade now and it's

The same argument can be made of PHP, COBOL, or even FORTRAN. None of this is changing the fact that Ruby has been on a sharp decline for a decade now and it's probably never coming back. My personal interpretation: Ruby is extremely slow, dynamically typed, and RoR hasn't kept up with the web innovations of the past decade.

ch4s3 5y ago
The new hotness seems to be html over web sockets, which Rails does.
eyegor 5y ago
I'm not sure how this applies to those languages. Ruby has an actual ecosystem via gems, and has a pretty nice syntax and language features so it's not hard to pick up. Pretty modern feeling even on older language versions. I think most of why it lost popularity is because faster ergonomic solutions have appeared, and python is a more popular competitor for dynamic backend langs (mainly due to ecosystem size). COBOL, PHP, and FORTRAN all lack modern ecosystems (package managers, etc) which hinder them significantly. COBOL is dead for new development because it has horrible ergonomics compared to modern languages. There's a reason why companies will pay big bucks if you're willing to maintain old COBOL with nearly no qualifications. PHP is still widely used, but it's also got some language quirks and was mainly aimed at backend work. Since most web dev tries to offload onto the user instead of the server now, it's disappearing for both reasons. FORTRAN is still widely used in academic research and the modern language version (f90+) is actually pretty nice to work in imo. It's a decent competitor to C/C++ and the compilers are nuts for scaling which is why it sticks around for scientific work. It's practically free to move from single node to a full cluster workload using only compiler flags.
- simion314 5y ago
  >COBOL, PHP, and FORTRAN all lack modern ecosystems (package managers, etc) which hinder them significantly. I think your PHP info is wrong, PHP has a package manager named composer. So if you need to connect to amazon S3 amazon published a package (that does't depend on 100 leftpads) https://packagist.org/packages/aws/aws-sdk-php https://packagist.org/packages/aws/aws-sdk-php Maybe is not modern enoug in your opinion? Then what is missing except lefpad and color-red ?
- sidkshatriya 5y ago
  > COBOL, PHP, and FORTRAN all lack modern ecosystems (package managers, etc) which hinder them significantly. Its unfortunate that PHP has been clubbed with COBOL :-). You may not be aware but PHP has a great package manager called composer. It is intensively used in the PHP community for a long time now. The packages are available at https://packagist.org/ https://packagist.org/ . Packagist houses 300,000+ packages and has received 50 Billion package downloads since 2012 (See https://packagist.org/statistics https://packagist.org/statistics ). PHP's Packagist would actually would easily rank amongst the biggest package management ecosystems among programming languages. PHP is certainly not disappearing. While it is no longer as dominant as it used to be and there is a slow, long term decline, it continues to be very active. Ruby's decline actually is sharper than PHP. Here is an interesting resource https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/08/05/top-20-june-2021/ https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/08/05/top-20-june-2021/ . All statistics need to be taken into perspective but if you look at other proxy activity like GitHub PRs, projects, jobs etc. for PHP, it continues to be very strong. Using the word "disappearing" feels wrong to me. Trends are not irreversible. Over the years, languages have gone down, only to come back up. P.S. Fortran is still going strong also. It is still used extensively in the Scientific Computing community. While, I'm not familiar with the ecosystem there are package managers in Fortran too. I'm not familiar with how good or popular they are though.
pantulis 5y ago
Of course it will come back, you just need to wait until dynamic typing becomes fashionable again. Development time is still more important than operational speed.
- hota_mazi 5y ago
  I very much doubt dynamic typing will ever come back, it's a thing of the past now. No sane new project will ever start in a dynamically typed language. Modern statically typed languages do everything that dynamic languages do and a lot more.
  - janglezz 5y ago
    I’d bet against this. Ruby has a great community and Rails 7 is looking amazing. Dynamic typing is very much alive and well.

ch4s3 5y ago

The new hotness seems to be html over web sockets, which Rails does.

eyegor 5y ago

I'm not sure how this applies to those languages. Ruby has an actual ecosystem via gems, and has a pretty nice syntax and language features so it's not hard to pick up. Pretty modern feeling even on older language versions. I think most of why it lost popularity is because faster ergonomic solutions have appeared, and python is a more popular competitor for dynamic backend langs (mainly due to ecosystem size). COBOL, PHP, and FORTRAN all lack modern ecosystems (package managers, etc) which hinder them significantly. COBOL is dead for new development because it has horrible ergonomics compared to modern languages. There's a reason why companies will pay big bucks if you're willing to maintain old COBOL with nearly no qualifications. PHP is still widely used, but it's also got some language quirks and was mainly aimed at backend work. Since most web dev tries to offload onto the user instead of the server now, it's disappearing for both reasons. FORTRAN is still widely used in academic research and the modern language version (f90+) is actually pretty nice to work in imo. It's a decent competitor to C/C++ and the compilers are nuts for scaling which is why it sticks around for scientific work. It's practically free to move from single node to a full cluster workload using only compiler flags.

simion314 5y ago
>COBOL, PHP, and FORTRAN all lack modern ecosystems (package managers, etc) which hinder them significantly. I think your PHP info is wrong, PHP has a package manager named composer. So if you need to connect to amazon S3 amazon published a package (that does't depend on 100 leftpads) https://packagist.org/packages/aws/aws-sdk-php https://packagist.org/packages/aws/aws-sdk-php Maybe is not modern enoug in your opinion? Then what is missing except lefpad and color-red ?
sidkshatriya 5y ago
> COBOL, PHP, and FORTRAN all lack modern ecosystems (package managers, etc) which hinder them significantly. Its unfortunate that PHP has been clubbed with COBOL :-). You may not be aware but PHP has a great package manager called composer. It is intensively used in the PHP community for a long time now. The packages are available at https://packagist.org/ https://packagist.org/ . Packagist houses 300,000+ packages and has received 50 Billion package downloads since 2012 (See https://packagist.org/statistics https://packagist.org/statistics ). PHP's Packagist would actually would easily rank amongst the biggest package management ecosystems among programming languages. PHP is certainly not disappearing. While it is no longer as dominant as it used to be and there is a slow, long term decline, it continues to be very active. Ruby's decline actually is sharper than PHP. Here is an interesting resource https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/08/05/top-20-june-2021/ https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/08/05/top-20-june-2021/ . All statistics need to be taken into perspective but if you look at other proxy activity like GitHub PRs, projects, jobs etc. for PHP, it continues to be very strong. Using the word "disappearing" feels wrong to me. Trends are not irreversible. Over the years, languages have gone down, only to come back up. P.S. Fortran is still going strong also. It is still used extensively in the Scientific Computing community. While, I'm not familiar with the ecosystem there are package managers in Fortran too. I'm not familiar with how good or popular they are though.

pantulis 5y ago

Of course it will come back, you just need to wait until dynamic typing becomes fashionable again. Development time is still more important than operational speed.

hota_mazi 5y ago
I very much doubt dynamic typing will ever come back, it's a thing of the past now. No sane new project will ever start in a dynamically typed language. Modern statically typed languages do everything that dynamic languages do and a lot more.
- janglezz 5y ago
  I’d bet against this. Ruby has a great community and Rails 7 is looking amazing. Dynamic typing is very much alive and well.