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I do wonder about the long term success of Ruby. Rails is easily the most visible project for Ruby. Rails is big, and all that code represents a high barrier to

I do wonder about the long term success of Ruby. Rails is easily the most visible project for Ruby. Rails is big, and all that code represents a high barrier to entry for any framework in a different language that wants to compete. However, a lot of people I talk to are moving to pure JS front-end + REST backend. In this world Rails doesn't deliver any particular value (in my opinion). Ruby also has utility for doing lots of scripting type tasks (things like Jekyll). The libraries you need to do this are simple to write. Python is perfectly adequate for this task already, as is Node (modulo callback spaghetti). So there is no barrier to entry here. In summary I don't see any project going forward that provides enough value to maintain interest in Ruby. Thoughts? [NB: I'm not saying Ruby is going to die overnight. I just think it will slowly become less relevant.]

rb2k_ 14y ago
> Thoughts? I think most of the things you say sound like you haven't worked with either. Few people are moving to pure JS front-end. Some are, some write blogposts about it, but the majority of people isn't. Some are even moving back, a year or so ago there were a lot of blogposts about that kind of stuff. Rails offers a lot of interesting things in the M and C parts of the MVC pattern (Object persistence, REST endpoints, ...). People even write books about the topic ( https://learn.thoughtbot.com/products/1-backbone-js-on-rails https://learn.thoughtbot.com/products/1-backbone-js-on-rails ) Ruby and Python are pretty similar and as with Java and C++, there is space for both. I personally like Ruby more, but I guess that's just a matter of style.
- noelwelsh 14y ago
  FWIW, I only used examples with which I have personal experience. All new front-end projects we're doing are pure JS. I've used Jekyll in various commercial and non-commercial applications.
  - rschmitty 14y ago
    http://engineering.twitter.com/2012/05/improving-performance-on-twittercom.html http://engineering.twitter.com/2012/05/improving-performance...
    - acjohnson55 14y ago
      Great article! Are there any other good resources to read about how best to architect a modern rich web app?
smnrchrds 14y ago
> I just think it will slowly become less relevant. That's true for virtually anything. Do you think C/C++ or Java or JS will be mainstream 30 years from now. They will be in the same situation FORTRAN is today: important because of lots of legacy code, but not a viable choice when starting a new project. Of course some of them will never die. LISP comes to my mind. :-)
- noelwelsh 14y ago
  Sure. It's the time scale that's important. Irrelevant in 30 years has vastly different implications to irrelevant in 5.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >Of course some of them will never die. LISP comes to my mind. :-) Or, to put it another way, LISP was never alive to begin with. If Ruby/Python had a community and third party libraries the size of LISP we would consider them mostly irrelevant languages.
  - rjbond3rd 14y ago
    > ...we would consider them mostly irrelevant languages. And apparently "we" are using "irrelevant" to mean not fashionable. Or does it mean, "Do not use for new IT projects" or something? What does it matter what other people do, especially those with a strong (if small) community, frameworks, libraries, books, articles, conferences... And where does Smalltalk fall? I hate to tell those people their language is "irrelevant" -- will their programs crash? And which LISP, by the way? This irrelevance property is dumber than a language debate because we don't even debate them, we condemn them from the outside by applying our own arbitrary criteria. Why do we need to belittle the work of others? Maybe we are not as sure as we appear.
    - coldtea 14y ago
      >And apparently "we" are using "irrelevant" to mean not fashionable. Or does it mean, "Do not use for new IT projects" or something? What does it matter what other people do, especially those with a strong (if small) community, frameworks, libraries, books, articles, conferences... It matters because there is not enough of "community, frameworks, libraries, books, articles, conferences". If I want to do something in LISP there are 2-3 libraries in different states of broken and/or abandoned. In Python I can usually find something with much more ease. In Java even more so. The same for hiring programmers AND getting hired yourself, etc etc. >And where does Smalltalk fall? I hate to tell those people their language is "irrelevant" -- will their programs crash? You don't have to tell them. They know it already. It has been ever since most Smalltalk shops closed and the bigger ones turned over to supporting Java. Now, people using Smalltalk to do hobby work, or even nice important work with paying customers, good for them. Their programs will not crash (unless their Smalltalk platform of choice gets abandoned to die with too few contributors or is proprietary and doesn't get support for newer platforms and architectures). But they wont be getting as much new toys as the other boys. >And which LISP, by the way? All of them, inc. Common Lisp. Clojure might have a fighting chance, but it still is too small for people who value ecosystem over cowboy style "let's build all the wheels ourselves". >This irrelevance property is dumber than a language debate because we don't even debate them, we condemn them from the outside by applying our own arbitrary criteria. Irrelevant? It's very pragmatic. Number of available employers, employees, number of documentation, vibrancy of the ecosystem, new libraries and continuous support for older libraries, etc. I would love to have a Smalltalk that is well supported to play with. One that is not aimed at kids and doesn't have a Fisher Price UI like Squeeze, and that can match Python or Java for ecosystem. Unfortunately none exists.
zem 14y ago
rails may be the most visible ruby project out there (and indeed the "killer app" that got a lot of people and businesses into ruby), but it is by no means critical or even necessary for ruby's continuing success. check out puppet's userbase, for instance - there are some huge companies using it to manage their deployments. jruby could well become one of the go-to jvm automation solutions down the road; it's certainly doing everything right to get there. but more than any of that, ruby is simply the most productive language i've encountered for performing quick one-off tasks and exploring algorithms. it has all the strengths of perl (another language that plays very well in this particular niche), and adds very natural support for both object-oriented and functional approaches. i've used lots of languages (everything from basic to haskell) and ruby is almost unique in that i have never felt like i was fighting with the language to put my ideas into code. i think of the way i'd like to say something, and sure enough, ruby supports it and more often than not makes it easy and natural.
siong1987 14y ago
RubyMotion is actually pretty cool. So far, the adoption of RubyMotion isn't too bad.
- fatboy 14y ago
  Agreed. As is MacRuby, though it doesn't compile down like RubyMotion. As is Hamish Sanderson's RB-Appscript (AppleScript replacement), although the deprecation of carbon events has sunk it sadly.
vidarh 14y ago
As a Ruby user that finds Rails annoying and not something I like working with, I don't think that's all that relevant. A lot of people have come to Ruby because of Rails, but a lot of Ruby people dislike Rails too. There's a plethora of web frameworks for Ruby that have sprung up exactly because of people who want to use Ruby but don't like Rails. In terms for barrier to entry with Python, the issue is that a lot of us chose Ruby over Python already for very specific reasons. Pythons whitespace usage, for example, makes it DOA for me. I'm not touching it. If it works for you, great. It doesn't work for me. Ruby is the project that provides enough value for me to maintain interest in Ruby, and that's what I see with lots of other Ruby users too: The language is sufficiently more fun to work with that we're willing to put up with quite a lot, including horrible performance, to work with it. Ruby might become less relevant to others, but I don't care if that were to happen. It will only become less relevant to me the day a new language comes along that is even more pleasurable to program in. So far I've not seen anything get close.
- wyuenho 14y ago
  I have a habit of bringing up this page every time I hear someone talk about Python whitespace. I'm not sure if you've read this, but here it is anyway. http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk Summary: Python's whitespace usage is nothing like Make's.
- army 14y ago
  You seriously would turn down a good job or other opportunity if the only downside was having to write in a whitespace-sensitive language? Most of the good developers I know have their preferences for sure, but can be productive in all sorts of languages.
  - ww520 14y ago
    There are plenty of other good jobs that don't require Python. He has already said others like it but it doesn't work for him personally. Why beat it over his head for your preference?
dasil003 14y ago
It's a weird jump of logic to say that because the biggest Ruby project (Rails) is overkill for a particular architectural flavor (JS + REST backend) that this will lead to Ruby's decline. Even assuming the market moves wholesale to pure REST backend (which is quite unlikely frankly, because not everything on the web is a CRUD-heavy app, documents still dominate), and Rails does not fit the bill (which is also arguable since moving to pure REST API only makes views/helpers irrelevant, which is at best 20% of Rails), then you would see other frameworks like Sinatra/Padrino rise to prominence. The only way Ruby becomes irrelevant is if a new paradigm becomes dominant that just isn't easy to implement in Ruby. Threaded/evented/asynchronous frameworks do fit the bill, but my sense is that enough people prefer Ruby so much to a language like Javascript (in the case of Node), that if something like web sockets become indispensable as an 80% use-case, then the Ruby community will figure out how to make it easier to use them. I'm still using MRI which has some difficult problems to solve, but it seems JRuby is pretty much ready to pick up the slack if it really becomes necessary.
tjlivesey 14y ago
>However, a lot of people I talk to are moving to pure JS front-end + REST backend. In this world Rails doesn't deliver any particular value (in my opinion). I agree with this but I think there is a place for a javascript framework tied fairly closely to Rails. Possibly ember.js since the attitude towards both seems similarly opinionated and Yehuda Katz is one of the ember team. The Rails API gem accommodates this quite nicely as well although one of the benefits of Rails' modular design is that you can lose lots of the stuff you don't need if you are only building a REST API. Maybe this is the future of Rails?
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  I maintain rails-api, and both Yehuda and I have commit to Rails. I just want to mention that while Ember + Rails will be a potent combo, Ember will work great with non-Rails backends as well, and rails-api will work great with other frameworks too. That said, we're working really hard to make sure that Rails 4 + rails-api + Ember 1.0 is a fantastic experience, so watch that space for sure.
  - tjlivesey 14y ago
    Thanks for all the hard work Steve. I have been waiting for ember 1.0 to really give it a proper go but I'm looking forward to it. It seems like a slightly steeper learning curve than something like backbone but I'm sure it will do more for you once you get to grips with it.
    - steveklabnik 14y ago
      <3 The peepcode on Ember is really worth the $12, it's a great introduction. I really believe in what Ember is doing quite a bit. As far as Ember vs. Backbone, it's like Rails vs. Sinatra: Backbone is 'easier' but then you have to write a ton of stuff yourself. Ember has more going on, but you write a lot less code. But where Ember really shines is the way it deals with URIs and routing. I think it's super far ahead of other JS frameworks in this respect, and I hope routing.js sees some pickup.
    - 14y ago
steveklabnik 14y ago
> In this world Rails doesn't deliver any particular value (in my opinion). I beg to differ, though I'm biased. Rails still offers a lot. https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api#why-use-rails-for-json-apis https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api#why-use-rails-for-jso...
philwelch 14y ago
The pure JS front-end approach has its advantages, but it adds a lot of complexity for advantages that don't necessarily matter. Oftentimes if not always, you get better results by rendering the HTML server-side rather than client-side. I'm more worried about Javascript. Unlike Ruby, which has genuine advantages separate from Rails, Javascript is almost entirely propped up by its status as the only language available for DOM manipulation. Once it loses that footing, it's not a very viable language in and of itself.
nathan_long 14y ago
I work in Ruby and Rails. I can much more easily imagine moving away from Rails than from Ruby. It's such an enjoyable language to work with that I doubt I'll ever put it aside.
__david__ 14y ago
Your argument has this implicit assumption that, all things being the equal, people will choose node.js and Python over Ruby. I don't think this assumption is valid in the slightest and I think it's just showing your own bias. Of the three I think Ruby is the better language. I still like Perl though, so what do I know. :-)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
anko 14y ago
I always put python and ruby on par, too. I think there are various language features that attract you to one or the other. I find ruby an incredible fit to the way I like to be creative. I find that the ruby community tends to be fairly vibrant, passionate and innovative. I think the language lends itself to a creative way of thinking, and that shows in the projects that are created in it. Blocks are amazing, and really clean up code for what is a very common usage pattern. I'm semi-offended by python because of the lack of what I deem to be an elegant equivalent. Not as offended as I am by perl or java, but I used to like those languages too. I detest the python string interpolation syntax - #{} is so much nicer. And I suspect that for other people these choices matter too. Why weren't things like Sinatra, Sass, Less, Jekyll, Metasploit and Rails invented on another language? Other languages would be adequate for the task as you put it. Github is arguably the biggest thing to happen to open source in recent years. As far as JS front ends/Rails go, I think we could get there one day and there are tradeoffs but you have a few problems with the model you propose; 1) Javascript sucks as a language 2) Server side rendering is always going to give you more control 3) accessibility is easier if you have a server side fallback. "Best Practice" has always switched between centralised and decentralised throughout the history of IT. With Rails you can do both.

rb2k_ 14y ago

> Thoughts? I think most of the things you say sound like you haven't worked with either. Few people are moving to pure JS front-end. Some are, some write blogposts about it, but the majority of people isn't. Some are even moving back, a year or so ago there were a lot of blogposts about that kind of stuff. Rails offers a lot of interesting things in the M and C parts of the MVC pattern (Object persistence, REST endpoints, ...). People even write books about the topic ( https://learn.thoughtbot.com/products/1-backbone-js-on-rails https://learn.thoughtbot.com/products/1-backbone-js-on-rails ) Ruby and Python are pretty similar and as with Java and C++, there is space for both. I personally like Ruby more, but I guess that's just a matter of style.

noelwelsh 14y ago
FWIW, I only used examples with which I have personal experience. All new front-end projects we're doing are pure JS. I've used Jekyll in various commercial and non-commercial applications.
- rschmitty 14y ago
  http://engineering.twitter.com/2012/05/improving-performance-on-twittercom.html http://engineering.twitter.com/2012/05/improving-performance...
  - acjohnson55 14y ago
    Great article! Are there any other good resources to read about how best to architect a modern rich web app?

smnrchrds 14y ago

> I just think it will slowly become less relevant. That's true for virtually anything. Do you think C/C++ or Java or JS will be mainstream 30 years from now. They will be in the same situation FORTRAN is today: important because of lots of legacy code, but not a viable choice when starting a new project. Of course some of them will never die. LISP comes to my mind. :-)

noelwelsh 14y ago
Sure. It's the time scale that's important. Irrelevant in 30 years has vastly different implications to irrelevant in 5.
coldtea 14y ago
>Of course some of them will never die. LISP comes to my mind. :-) Or, to put it another way, LISP was never alive to begin with. If Ruby/Python had a community and third party libraries the size of LISP we would consider them mostly irrelevant languages.
- rjbond3rd 14y ago
  > ...we would consider them mostly irrelevant languages. And apparently "we" are using "irrelevant" to mean not fashionable. Or does it mean, "Do not use for new IT projects" or something? What does it matter what other people do, especially those with a strong (if small) community, frameworks, libraries, books, articles, conferences... And where does Smalltalk fall? I hate to tell those people their language is "irrelevant" -- will their programs crash? And which LISP, by the way? This irrelevance property is dumber than a language debate because we don't even debate them, we condemn them from the outside by applying our own arbitrary criteria. Why do we need to belittle the work of others? Maybe we are not as sure as we appear.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >And apparently "we" are using "irrelevant" to mean not fashionable. Or does it mean, "Do not use for new IT projects" or something? What does it matter what other people do, especially those with a strong (if small) community, frameworks, libraries, books, articles, conferences... It matters because there is not enough of "community, frameworks, libraries, books, articles, conferences". If I want to do something in LISP there are 2-3 libraries in different states of broken and/or abandoned. In Python I can usually find something with much more ease. In Java even more so. The same for hiring programmers AND getting hired yourself, etc etc. >And where does Smalltalk fall? I hate to tell those people their language is "irrelevant" -- will their programs crash? You don't have to tell them. They know it already. It has been ever since most Smalltalk shops closed and the bigger ones turned over to supporting Java. Now, people using Smalltalk to do hobby work, or even nice important work with paying customers, good for them. Their programs will not crash (unless their Smalltalk platform of choice gets abandoned to die with too few contributors or is proprietary and doesn't get support for newer platforms and architectures). But they wont be getting as much new toys as the other boys. >And which LISP, by the way? All of them, inc. Common Lisp. Clojure might have a fighting chance, but it still is too small for people who value ecosystem over cowboy style "let's build all the wheels ourselves". >This irrelevance property is dumber than a language debate because we don't even debate them, we condemn them from the outside by applying our own arbitrary criteria. Irrelevant? It's very pragmatic. Number of available employers, employees, number of documentation, vibrancy of the ecosystem, new libraries and continuous support for older libraries, etc. I would love to have a Smalltalk that is well supported to play with. One that is not aimed at kids and doesn't have a Fisher Price UI like Squeeze, and that can match Python or Java for ecosystem. Unfortunately none exists.

zem 14y ago

rails may be the most visible ruby project out there (and indeed the "killer app" that got a lot of people and businesses into ruby), but it is by no means critical or even necessary for ruby's continuing success. check out puppet's userbase, for instance - there are some huge companies using it to manage their deployments. jruby could well become one of the go-to jvm automation solutions down the road; it's certainly doing everything right to get there. but more than any of that, ruby is simply the most productive language i've encountered for performing quick one-off tasks and exploring algorithms. it has all the strengths of perl (another language that plays very well in this particular niche), and adds very natural support for both object-oriented and functional approaches. i've used lots of languages (everything from basic to haskell) and ruby is almost unique in that i have never felt like i was fighting with the language to put my ideas into code. i think of the way i'd like to say something, and sure enough, ruby supports it and more often than not makes it easy and natural.

siong1987 14y ago

RubyMotion is actually pretty cool. So far, the adoption of RubyMotion isn't too bad.

fatboy 14y ago
Agreed. As is MacRuby, though it doesn't compile down like RubyMotion. As is Hamish Sanderson's RB-Appscript (AppleScript replacement), although the deprecation of carbon events has sunk it sadly.

vidarh 14y ago

As a Ruby user that finds Rails annoying and not something I like working with, I don't think that's all that relevant. A lot of people have come to Ruby because of Rails, but a lot of Ruby people dislike Rails too. There's a plethora of web frameworks for Ruby that have sprung up exactly because of people who want to use Ruby but don't like Rails. In terms for barrier to entry with Python, the issue is that a lot of us chose Ruby over Python already for very specific reasons. Pythons whitespace usage, for example, makes it DOA for me. I'm not touching it. If it works for you, great. It doesn't work for me. Ruby is the project that provides enough value for me to maintain interest in Ruby, and that's what I see with lots of other Ruby users too: The language is sufficiently more fun to work with that we're willing to put up with quite a lot, including horrible performance, to work with it. Ruby might become less relevant to others, but I don't care if that were to happen. It will only become less relevant to me the day a new language comes along that is even more pleasurable to program in. So far I've not seen anything get close.

wyuenho 14y ago
I have a habit of bringing up this page every time I hear someone talk about Python whitespace. I'm not sure if you've read this, but here it is anyway. http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk Summary: Python's whitespace usage is nothing like Make's.
army 14y ago
You seriously would turn down a good job or other opportunity if the only downside was having to write in a whitespace-sensitive language? Most of the good developers I know have their preferences for sure, but can be productive in all sorts of languages.
- ww520 14y ago
  There are plenty of other good jobs that don't require Python. He has already said others like it but it doesn't work for him personally. Why beat it over his head for your preference?

dasil003 14y ago

It's a weird jump of logic to say that because the biggest Ruby project (Rails) is overkill for a particular architectural flavor (JS + REST backend) that this will lead to Ruby's decline. Even assuming the market moves wholesale to pure REST backend (which is quite unlikely frankly, because not everything on the web is a CRUD-heavy app, documents still dominate), and Rails does not fit the bill (which is also arguable since moving to pure REST API only makes views/helpers irrelevant, which is at best 20% of Rails), then you would see other frameworks like Sinatra/Padrino rise to prominence. The only way Ruby becomes irrelevant is if a new paradigm becomes dominant that just isn't easy to implement in Ruby. Threaded/evented/asynchronous frameworks do fit the bill, but my sense is that enough people prefer Ruby so much to a language like Javascript (in the case of Node), that if something like web sockets become indispensable as an 80% use-case, then the Ruby community will figure out how to make it easier to use them. I'm still using MRI which has some difficult problems to solve, but it seems JRuby is pretty much ready to pick up the slack if it really becomes necessary.

tjlivesey 14y ago

>However, a lot of people I talk to are moving to pure JS front-end + REST backend. In this world Rails doesn't deliver any particular value (in my opinion). I agree with this but I think there is a place for a javascript framework tied fairly closely to Rails. Possibly ember.js since the attitude towards both seems similarly opinionated and Yehuda Katz is one of the ember team. The Rails API gem accommodates this quite nicely as well although one of the benefits of Rails' modular design is that you can lose lots of the stuff you don't need if you are only building a REST API. Maybe this is the future of Rails?

steveklabnik 14y ago
I maintain rails-api, and both Yehuda and I have commit to Rails. I just want to mention that while Ember + Rails will be a potent combo, Ember will work great with non-Rails backends as well, and rails-api will work great with other frameworks too. That said, we're working really hard to make sure that Rails 4 + rails-api + Ember 1.0 is a fantastic experience, so watch that space for sure.
- tjlivesey 14y ago
  Thanks for all the hard work Steve. I have been waiting for ember 1.0 to really give it a proper go but I'm looking forward to it. It seems like a slightly steeper learning curve than something like backbone but I'm sure it will do more for you once you get to grips with it.
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    <3 The peepcode on Ember is really worth the $12, it's a great introduction. I really believe in what Ember is doing quite a bit. As far as Ember vs. Backbone, it's like Rails vs. Sinatra: Backbone is 'easier' but then you have to write a ton of stuff yourself. Ember has more going on, but you write a lot less code. But where Ember really shines is the way it deals with URIs and routing. I think it's super far ahead of other JS frameworks in this respect, and I hope routing.js sees some pickup.
  - 14y ago

steveklabnik 14y ago

> In this world Rails doesn't deliver any particular value (in my opinion). I beg to differ, though I'm biased. Rails still offers a lot. https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api#why-use-rails-for-json-apis https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api#why-use-rails-for-jso...

philwelch 14y ago

The pure JS front-end approach has its advantages, but it adds a lot of complexity for advantages that don't necessarily matter. Oftentimes if not always, you get better results by rendering the HTML server-side rather than client-side. I'm more worried about Javascript. Unlike Ruby, which has genuine advantages separate from Rails, Javascript is almost entirely propped up by its status as the only language available for DOM manipulation. Once it loses that footing, it's not a very viable language in and of itself.

nathan_long 14y ago

I work in Ruby and Rails. I can much more easily imagine moving away from Rails than from Ruby. It's such an enjoyable language to work with that I doubt I'll ever put it aside.

__david__ 14y ago

Your argument has this implicit assumption that, all things being the equal, people will choose node.js and Python over Ruby. I don't think this assumption is valid in the slightest and I think it's just showing your own bias. Of the three I think Ruby is the better language. I still like Perl though, so what do I know. :-)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

anko 14y ago

I always put python and ruby on par, too. I think there are various language features that attract you to one or the other. I find ruby an incredible fit to the way I like to be creative. I find that the ruby community tends to be fairly vibrant, passionate and innovative. I think the language lends itself to a creative way of thinking, and that shows in the projects that are created in it. Blocks are amazing, and really clean up code for what is a very common usage pattern. I'm semi-offended by python because of the lack of what I deem to be an elegant equivalent. Not as offended as I am by perl or java, but I used to like those languages too. I detest the python string interpolation syntax - #{} is so much nicer. And I suspect that for other people these choices matter too. Why weren't things like Sinatra, Sass, Less, Jekyll, Metasploit and Rails invented on another language? Other languages would be adequate for the task as you put it. Github is arguably the biggest thing to happen to open source in recent years. As far as JS front ends/Rails go, I think we could get there one day and there are tradeoffs but you have a few problems with the model you propose; 1) Javascript sucks as a language 2) Server side rendering is always going to give you more control 3) accessibility is easier if you have a server side fallback. "Best Practice" has always switched between centralised and decentralised throughout the history of IT. With Rails you can do both.