16 ms·

The Waning of Ruby and Rails

3 points by myth_drannon 5y ago

cutler 5y ago
Google Trends is not the place to be looking. Programming Language adoption is best gauged by the number of jobs which require skill in the language. Ruby and Rails adoption according to Indeed.com/co.uk has been steady for many years, though not at the levels seen when at its peak. Rails is particularly popular in the U.S. and it is more accurate to describe it as boring tech rather than dying. There are currently 260 Rails jobs in London according to Indeed.co.uk and 1124 Ruby jobs which is still over 1000 if you knock-off 10% for non-tech Ruby results.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- berkes 5y ago
  > Google Trends is not the place to be looking. It isn't. Author here. That is why I wrote the post and included many more sources, stackoverflow insights, Tiobe, rubygems.org, github etc. I'm sorry If I did not put this forward more clearly. The initial graph was mostly a hook, and not so much proof, as I mentioned in the first paragraph. I presume you did not read the article, but if you did, could you help me write better articles next time, by showing me how I could put this point more forward? I did include it in the first paragraph, but maybe that gets overlooked?
  - cutler 5y ago
    Yes, I read the whole article but as you were going for Google Trends as your opener I thought I'd counter with job stats which you didn't really dwell on much in the rest of the article. Point taken, however, that a lot of Rails jobs are probably legacy code. I think the major factor in the relative decline of Ruby and Rails is that microservices are better served by languages with first-class support for async or concurrency.
_3u10 5y ago
So? What’s the point. How is google trends relevant to anything? I can show you the same graph for C, it’s not like people stopped running Linux cuz it’s still written in C.
- berkes 5y ago
  I'm presuming you did not read the article, but chose not to read it, based on the first impression? If so, I'm honestly curious as to what could have made you read on, because the points you are making, are the points I make in the article (albeit not about C, but about Java or Python). I did my best to make a nuanced, founded statement that *relative to those tech" Ruby is waning. And where "founded" means that I take a lot of sources, because, as I point out in the very first paragraph: Google trends is a poor source.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    The data seems mostly cherry picked. Like say azure support, azure is mostly a windows shop thing. It’s like pointing out that the oracle driver for ruby hasn’t been updated in a while. Not many people run rails on oracle.
Trasmatta 5y ago
Time for the monthly "Ruby / Rails is dead" blog post. There's been hundreds of these over the past decade, and yet both Ruby and Rails have continued on, where many other technologies have died out.
- berkes 5y ago
  I deliberately avoided the word "dead", and did my very best to make the nuanced, based in many sourced numbers and compare it to other technology that is old or older yet does continue to run on. To cite the last paragraph, in case you did not read all the way through: > Does that mean learning Ruby or Rails is a poor career choice? Certainly not! The demand for Rails and Ruby developers is high as ever, if only because general demand for developers is ever increasing. And all that SAAS, built since 2008, needs developers for the coming decades. But be aware of the risk of becoming the COBOL or Perl developer maintaining some dusty legacy if the downward trend for Ruby continues as it did last decade.
berkes 5y ago
FWIW: I submitted my article just a few seconds after myth_drannon submitted this one. Thanks for that, I'm honestly flattered that "random strangers" share my articles. My submission to HN is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600362

3 points by myth_drannon 5y ago

Google Trends is not the place to be looking. Programming Language adoption is best gauged by the number of jobs which require skill in the language. Ruby and Rails adoption according to Indeed.com/co.uk has been steady for many years, though not at the levels seen when at its peak. Rails is particularly popular in the U.S. and it is more accurate to describe it as boring tech rather than dying. There are currently 260 Rails jobs in London according to Indeed.co.uk and 1124 Ruby jobs which is still over 1000 if you knock-off 10% for non-tech Ruby results.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
berkes 5y ago
> Google Trends is not the place to be looking. It isn't. Author here. That is why I wrote the post and included many more sources, stackoverflow insights, Tiobe, rubygems.org, github etc. I'm sorry If I did not put this forward more clearly. The initial graph was mostly a hook, and not so much proof, as I mentioned in the first paragraph. I presume you did not read the article, but if you did, could you help me write better articles next time, by showing me how I could put this point more forward? I did include it in the first paragraph, but maybe that gets overlooked?
- cutler 5y ago
  Yes, I read the whole article but as you were going for Google Trends as your opener I thought I'd counter with job stats which you didn't really dwell on much in the rest of the article. Point taken, however, that a lot of Rails jobs are probably legacy code. I think the major factor in the relative decline of Ruby and Rails is that microservices are better served by languages with first-class support for async or concurrency.

_3u10 5y ago

So? What’s the point. How is google trends relevant to anything? I can show you the same graph for C, it’s not like people stopped running Linux cuz it’s still written in C.

berkes 5y ago
I'm presuming you did not read the article, but chose not to read it, based on the first impression? If so, I'm honestly curious as to what could have made you read on, because the points you are making, are the points I make in the article (albeit not about C, but about Java or Python). I did my best to make a nuanced, founded statement that *relative to those tech" Ruby is waning. And where "founded" means that I take a lot of sources, because, as I point out in the very first paragraph: Google trends is a poor source.
- _3u10 5y ago
  The data seems mostly cherry picked. Like say azure support, azure is mostly a windows shop thing. It’s like pointing out that the oracle driver for ruby hasn’t been updated in a while. Not many people run rails on oracle.

Trasmatta 5y ago

Time for the monthly "Ruby / Rails is dead" blog post. There's been hundreds of these over the past decade, and yet both Ruby and Rails have continued on, where many other technologies have died out.

berkes 5y ago
I deliberately avoided the word "dead", and did my very best to make the nuanced, based in many sourced numbers and compare it to other technology that is old or older yet does continue to run on. To cite the last paragraph, in case you did not read all the way through: > Does that mean learning Ruby or Rails is a poor career choice? Certainly not! The demand for Rails and Ruby developers is high as ever, if only because general demand for developers is ever increasing. And all that SAAS, built since 2008, needs developers for the coming decades. But be aware of the risk of becoming the COBOL or Perl developer maintaining some dusty legacy if the downward trend for Ruby continues as it did last decade.

berkes 5y ago

FWIW: I submitted my article just a few seconds after myth_drannon submitted this one. Thanks for that, I'm honestly flattered that "random strangers" share my articles. My submission to HN is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600362