I think writing off the popularity of languages that followed Perl as being due to fadishness.... You may be responding to something that isn't in the article

I think writing off the popularity of languages that followed Perl as being due to fadishness.... You may be responding to something that isn't in the article at all. I first learned Ruby in 2000, mostly because Dave and Andy sent me a copy of the just-published Pickaxe book. There were few reasons to use Ruby in the English-speaking world back then, unless you were a language magpie or had very simple needs and didn't already have a scripting language in your toolkit. I didn't do much with it until 2004, when Dave told me to check out the nascent Rails. (I'd already failed to convince my employer to cover Ruby in more detail even though many of the clever and insightful people I knew had started to pay attention.) We published the first Rails article anyway, and it was a good thing we did. Even then, I didn't use Rails seriously myself because it and Ruby offered no benefits and only drawbacks. It was slower and had fewer libraries and worse tools than what I was already using. (Unlike a lot of Rails adopters, I wasn't primarily working in either J2EE or PHP.) In 2014, even with Ruby and Rails off of their 2007 peaks, the metrics have changed a little bit. Ruby and Rails have better job prospects, in my experience, while the tooling and ecosystem and languages themselves are roughly equivalent. (One's better in some aspects and the other is better in others.) Funny thing, though. It seems like around here Rails or Django are the old guard--the conservative technologies no one will lift an eyebrow at you using--and things like single-page client applications served by Node.js are the exciting technologies with new libraries and frameworks announced every week. Some of those will succeed. Some will fail. Given that I'm not 14 or 19 or 22 anymore, that I spend my days working hard to deliver value for clients and/or employers, and that I have other things to do on nights and weekends than sit in front of a computer, where do I focus my time and energy and resources so that I can both get things done well now and continue to be employable for the next fifteen or twenty or thirty years? That is what the article was about, not calling everything but Perl a fad.