I have so many thoughts about this post right now, that I find it hard to put them into a coherent comment. Still, I want them out there: 1) I, too, feel that

I have so many thoughts about this post right now, that I find it hard to put them into a coherent comment. Still, I want them out there: 1) I, too, feel that Ruby is no longer as fashionable as it used to be. I do not think this to be much of a problem and more like the natural way fashions work. But I still think the effect can be observed. It was not long ago that I learned about a cool new project written in Ruby here on HN on a weekly basis. These days, it has become a rare occurence. 2) It is a fact that the "cool kids" have moved on. But there is not the one big new thing. Rather, people who were popular in the Ruby world 5 years ago use Scala, Clojure, Node.js, Go and a few other things these days. 3) Still, Rails seems to be very popular with startups. Maybe not with the ones that are highly technical. But many of those just trying to get a mvp out there seem to default to rails these days. 4) I love Ruby. I used to love learning new programming languages. But ever since writing Ruby code on a daily basis, other languages most often fail to attract me. And I no longer look at technical benefits. Instead I take a look at the syntax and most often I am annoyed. Ruby has this effect on _some_ people, but not on others. For those who do not care about Ruby's aesthetics, there is probably little to keep them from trying out other languages. 5) There is little in the list of features on x.rubini.us that I disagree with. But at the same time, there is nothing I ever missed. Also, I am not convinced that all of those issues can or should be solved on the interpreter level. 6) Instead of a list of features, I would love to see a list of the kinds of applications that would benefit from those. I am not convinced that Node.js-style network services should be the future of Ruby.