6 ms·

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

giovannibonetti 3y ago
Github is built with Ruby on Rails and they are heavily investing on it, too. See this recent blog post [1] for more details. [1] https://github.blog/2023-04-06-building-github-with-ruby-and-rails/ https://github.blog/2023-04-06-building-github-with-ruby-and...
jrochkind1 3y ago
Github employees also send a lot of commits to Ruby and Rails. But probably not as many as Shoppify. There might be one or two additional big companies that are similarly funding employees to contribute to core infrastructure in significant ways. But not too many more than a handful, I agree. And they are carrying a lot of weight in ruby ecosystem for sure. I feel like this era of open source in general is one of very shifting patterns of contribution for sustainability. One or a few big companies paying people to keep the thing alive is definitely one that seems to be increasing. Perhaps since the company(ies) in question didn't originate the product(s) in this case, it doesn't feel like they "own" them exactly (not like "open source" products originated and developed by only one company where the product is their business itself -- not sure which category O'Caml fits in), but the risk in depending on only one or two companies (where the product is _not_ their actual business itself) is that if the company decides it no longer wants to make the investment, it can definitely be disastrous for the product. Shoppify just did a bunch of layoffs -- I don't think they hit the people contributing to ruby too hard, but they easily could have, except perhaps Shopify too realizes that if they stopped keeping Ruby alive it would be disastrous for their own business.
ksec 3y ago
Github is doing some as well. Although with resources from Microsoft I do wish they do more.
lagniappe 3y ago
You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adoption to slow down? Not at all, people should use what they like, however I think Rails and Ruby are in this negative spiral where: - rails is mostly needed for prototyping and crud apps - this work is typically done by juniors - rails devs are at this point largely seniors, not juniors - rails devs pay the bills with other tech or by maintaining legacy rails apps. There are startlingly few deviations from this, and either everyone majors in rails with a minor in javascript and C++ or they just get happy with their current gig and settle. I wish it weren't the case, but Ruby just hasn't done enough to differentiate itself from Rails, and when compared to neo-PHP or JS there's just not a lot of attractive parts of the golden path Rails provides. It's off-tune for this generation of choice and ubiquity. We don't need that level of scaffolding anymore and in many cases there are other tools that handle that with more versatility.
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago
  I mentally put Ruby / Rails and Python with Flask / Django (and also “neo” PHP) in the same category vs all of the 70 million JS frameworks. When you talk about alternatives, what are the major ones you have in mind?
- toolz 3y ago
  Are you suggesting php and JS are stealing from what would've otherwise been ruby projects? I've been a ruby dev for a decade and I've never heard of a ruby shop migrating to using php for new work and maybe one or two moving to JS for new work. It's golang and elixir that are taking the place of ruby for new work in my experience. I suspect some python too, but I haven't seen that.
  - runjake 3y ago
    I think they're suggesting that neo-PHP and JS adopted the best parts and patterns of Rails (eg. Laravel).
hardwaregeek 3y ago
This is wholly irrelevant, but I love the spelling of O'Caml like an Irish last name. I'd definitely frequent a pub called O'Caml's.
- noelwelsh 3y ago
  OCaml was originally a contraction of Objective Caml, and spelled O'Caml. At some point this changed and the spelling without the apostrophe was adopted. What comes out of my fingers hasn't caught up, though.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  Given the early logo for the language was Joe Camel, it would need a smoking room ...
brightball 3y ago
I don't know why, there are tons of smaller companies using it. I have a lot of languages and experience on my resume and the one that consistently gets me the most inquiries at the highest pay grades is still Ruby. Anecdotal I know, but from the moment that it appeared on my resume in 2012 it's been non-stop. Probably 80% of everything I hear about. Ruby and it's ecosystem brings the closest thing to natural Aspect Oriented Programming that I've seen in the wild, which is why it's so much more productive than everything else I've tried.
- clairity 3y ago
  i think if rails continues to push hotwire (turbo + stimulus, and perhaps strada?) and get a coherent story on view components, it will continue to take mindshare from the js hype of the last decade. mobile dev is in decline, and browser makers just released web notifications, web app support, webtransport, page transitions, etc., so the backend has largely reached parity for cross-platform development. no longer is json the natural data exchange medium for apps, but rather chucks of html that can be plopped right into the dom without js having to massage the response into shape on the frontend. js can return to being a frontend scripting language, its natural habitat, rather than being shoehorned into being a do-it-all platform language.
  - d3nj4l 3y ago
    I've been building a webapp with Rails on and off over weekends. Several times over this process, I thought through some of the architectural decisions and naturally realized that the "Rails way" was the best option to pursue. It's not just because I'm using Rails - my most recent webdev experience was with a SPA driven by a Java backend. I'm sure there are tradeoffs involved (what doesn't?) but with every passing day I use Rails the more I appreciate the decisions it makes for you.
    - graypegg 3y ago
      I’ve had the exact same experience! I’m getting to use some new JS SSR frameworks at work (Remix) but I keep using rails for my own things. Gets out of my way.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kjghkjghkjgh 3y ago
This is spoken like someone who knows nothing about Ruby.
riffraff 3y ago
stripe seemed to be doing quite a few interesting things (e.g. Sorbet, and there was some work adopting TUF for rubygems IIRC) but it seems to have dialled down things a bit.
ljm 3y ago
I think ‘is Ruby dying?’ is little more than a meme that has stuck around for longer than it deserves. The continuing work on the language and its performance is impressive, but Ruby (and Rails) themselves have the honour of being stable, tried-and-tested solutions for rapid application development. Is it as exciting as the latest and greatest serverless lambda framework in Typescript? Not really. Is it a dependable workhorse? Absolutely. At some point you might be successful enough to justify a rewrite into something else, but a simple Rails app will take you a long way with little effort.
- sergiotapia 3y ago
  I used to get invites for jobs and see listings for jobs for Ruby and Rails a lot. Now I don't see any at all. There's most definitely a "dead" feeling to the platform. I hardly hear about new projects being started with Rails as well...
  - scarnz 3y ago
    My co-founder and I are using RoR at our new company! It's definitely not dead and allows you to build SAAS very quickly.
  - 1123581321 3y ago
    It might just be the economy. I was getting about 20 inquiries a week from Rails positions until around December 2022. It's used in many companies, new and legacy.
    - fknorangesite 3y ago
      Yeah same story here. Until about 6-7 months ago I was hearing from recruiters for Rails jobs daily, both old and new projects. I'd be very surprised if the decrease since then is out of line with the rest of the industry, regardless of tech stack.
  - ljm 3y ago
    Probably depends where you’re based. Ruby is still lucrative in London and there is a healthy market for it both in startups and more established businesses. While I’ve branches out to other languages (not just JS as a full stack engineer) my career is still boosted by my Ruby experience. I don’t think this makes it dead or dying though. It’s stable and entrenched while JS has taken the place of the golden child. One complaint I’ll grant myself is that library development is a little less prolific this days. Again, there are well-established solutions to a lot of problems in Ruby so you’ll have a go-to collection of gems, but it’s more often the case these days that something doesn’t have much library support and you’ve got to roll your own.
sam0x17 3y ago
People forget Ruby is also massively popular in Japan to this day
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >People forget Ruby is also massively popular in Japan to this day So are fax machines.
johnisom2001 3y ago
This couldn't be further from the truth. There are so many people using Ruby, so many modern companies deciding to use it and so many large companies that continue to use it. The demand for Ruby developers is higher than the supply.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ksec 3y ago
  Your parent is talking about investing in Ruby the language and its ecosystem. Not just using it. The new GC, and JIT, along with a few Ruby Cores are all Shopify employees.
paulddraper 3y ago
Github: "Am I a joke to you?"

Github is built with Ruby on Rails and they are heavily investing on it, too. See this recent blog post [1] for more details. [1] https://github.blog/2023-04-06-building-github-with-ruby-and-rails/ https://github.blog/2023-04-06-building-github-with-ruby-and...

jrochkind1 3y ago

Github employees also send a lot of commits to Ruby and Rails. But probably not as many as Shoppify. There might be one or two additional big companies that are similarly funding employees to contribute to core infrastructure in significant ways. But not too many more than a handful, I agree. And they are carrying a lot of weight in ruby ecosystem for sure. I feel like this era of open source in general is one of very shifting patterns of contribution for sustainability. One or a few big companies paying people to keep the thing alive is definitely one that seems to be increasing. Perhaps since the company(ies) in question didn't originate the product(s) in this case, it doesn't feel like they "own" them exactly (not like "open source" products originated and developed by only one company where the product is their business itself -- not sure which category O'Caml fits in), but the risk in depending on only one or two companies (where the product is _not_ their actual business itself) is that if the company decides it no longer wants to make the investment, it can definitely be disastrous for the product. Shoppify just did a bunch of layoffs -- I don't think they hit the people contributing to ruby too hard, but they easily could have, except perhaps Shopify too realizes that if they stopped keeping Ruby alive it would be disastrous for their own business.

ksec 3y ago

Github is doing some as well. Although with resources from Microsoft I do wish they do more.

lagniappe 3y ago

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adoption to slow down? Not at all, people should use what they like, however I think Rails and Ruby are in this negative spiral where: - rails is mostly needed for prototyping and crud apps - this work is typically done by juniors - rails devs are at this point largely seniors, not juniors - rails devs pay the bills with other tech or by maintaining legacy rails apps. There are startlingly few deviations from this, and either everyone majors in rails with a minor in javascript and C++ or they just get happy with their current gig and settle. I wish it weren't the case, but Ruby just hasn't done enough to differentiate itself from Rails, and when compared to neo-PHP or JS there's just not a lot of attractive parts of the golden path Rails provides. It's off-tune for this generation of choice and ubiquity. We don't need that level of scaffolding anymore and in many cases there are other tools that handle that with more versatility.

rgrieselhuber 3y ago
I mentally put Ruby / Rails and Python with Flask / Django (and also “neo” PHP) in the same category vs all of the 70 million JS frameworks. When you talk about alternatives, what are the major ones you have in mind?
toolz 3y ago
Are you suggesting php and JS are stealing from what would've otherwise been ruby projects? I've been a ruby dev for a decade and I've never heard of a ruby shop migrating to using php for new work and maybe one or two moving to JS for new work. It's golang and elixir that are taking the place of ruby for new work in my experience. I suspect some python too, but I haven't seen that.
- runjake 3y ago
  I think they're suggesting that neo-PHP and JS adopted the best parts and patterns of Rails (eg. Laravel).

hardwaregeek 3y ago

This is wholly irrelevant, but I love the spelling of O'Caml like an Irish last name. I'd definitely frequent a pub called O'Caml's.

noelwelsh 3y ago
OCaml was originally a contraction of Objective Caml, and spelled O'Caml. At some point this changed and the spelling without the apostrophe was adopted. What comes out of my fingers hasn't caught up, though.
jjgreen 3y ago
Given the early logo for the language was Joe Camel, it would need a smoking room ...

brightball 3y ago

I don't know why, there are tons of smaller companies using it. I have a lot of languages and experience on my resume and the one that consistently gets me the most inquiries at the highest pay grades is still Ruby. Anecdotal I know, but from the moment that it appeared on my resume in 2012 it's been non-stop. Probably 80% of everything I hear about. Ruby and it's ecosystem brings the closest thing to natural Aspect Oriented Programming that I've seen in the wild, which is why it's so much more productive than everything else I've tried.

clairity 3y ago
i think if rails continues to push hotwire (turbo + stimulus, and perhaps strada?) and get a coherent story on view components, it will continue to take mindshare from the js hype of the last decade. mobile dev is in decline, and browser makers just released web notifications, web app support, webtransport, page transitions, etc., so the backend has largely reached parity for cross-platform development. no longer is json the natural data exchange medium for apps, but rather chucks of html that can be plopped right into the dom without js having to massage the response into shape on the frontend. js can return to being a frontend scripting language, its natural habitat, rather than being shoehorned into being a do-it-all platform language.
- d3nj4l 3y ago
  I've been building a webapp with Rails on and off over weekends. Several times over this process, I thought through some of the architectural decisions and naturally realized that the "Rails way" was the best option to pursue. It's not just because I'm using Rails - my most recent webdev experience was with a SPA driven by a Java backend. I'm sure there are tradeoffs involved (what doesn't?) but with every passing day I use Rails the more I appreciate the decisions it makes for you.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    I’ve had the exact same experience! I’m getting to use some new JS SSR frameworks at work (Remix) but I keep using rails for my own things. Gets out of my way.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kjghkjghkjgh 3y ago

This is spoken like someone who knows nothing about Ruby.

riffraff 3y ago

stripe seemed to be doing quite a few interesting things (e.g. Sorbet, and there was some work adopting TUF for rubygems IIRC) but it seems to have dialled down things a bit.

ljm 3y ago

I think ‘is Ruby dying?’ is little more than a meme that has stuck around for longer than it deserves. The continuing work on the language and its performance is impressive, but Ruby (and Rails) themselves have the honour of being stable, tried-and-tested solutions for rapid application development. Is it as exciting as the latest and greatest serverless lambda framework in Typescript? Not really. Is it a dependable workhorse? Absolutely. At some point you might be successful enough to justify a rewrite into something else, but a simple Rails app will take you a long way with little effort.

sergiotapia 3y ago
I used to get invites for jobs and see listings for jobs for Ruby and Rails a lot. Now I don't see any at all. There's most definitely a "dead" feeling to the platform. I hardly hear about new projects being started with Rails as well...
- scarnz 3y ago
  My co-founder and I are using RoR at our new company! It's definitely not dead and allows you to build SAAS very quickly.
- 1123581321 3y ago
  It might just be the economy. I was getting about 20 inquiries a week from Rails positions until around December 2022. It's used in many companies, new and legacy.
  - fknorangesite 3y ago
    Yeah same story here. Until about 6-7 months ago I was hearing from recruiters for Rails jobs daily, both old and new projects. I'd be very surprised if the decrease since then is out of line with the rest of the industry, regardless of tech stack.
- ljm 3y ago
  Probably depends where you’re based. Ruby is still lucrative in London and there is a healthy market for it both in startups and more established businesses. While I’ve branches out to other languages (not just JS as a full stack engineer) my career is still boosted by my Ruby experience. I don’t think this makes it dead or dying though. It’s stable and entrenched while JS has taken the place of the golden child. One complaint I’ll grant myself is that library development is a little less prolific this days. Again, there are well-established solutions to a lot of problems in Ruby so you’ll have a go-to collection of gems, but it’s more often the case these days that something doesn’t have much library support and you’ve got to roll your own.

sam0x17 3y ago

People forget Ruby is also massively popular in Japan to this day

ramesh31 3y ago
>People forget Ruby is also massively popular in Japan to this day So are fax machines.

johnisom2001 3y ago

This couldn't be further from the truth. There are so many people using Ruby, so many modern companies deciding to use it and so many large companies that continue to use it. The demand for Ruby developers is higher than the supply.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ksec 3y ago
Your parent is talking about investing in Ruby the language and its ecosystem. Not just using it. The new GC, and JIT, along with a few Ruby Cores are all Shopify employees.

paulddraper 3y ago

Github: "Am I a joke to you?"