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dillan teagle
dillan teagle

Posted on • Updated on

Is ruby dead?

My previous company used ruby and rails throughout the company. I would say in Nashville adleast, Ruby is not a common choice of a technology stack. In Nashville, unfortunately there is so many .NET shops with the healthcare startups. Although, other large tech companies like Lyft, EventBrite, CampaignMonitor, Amazon, etc...do not choose ruby as there foundational language.

I feel like even the open source community and the online learning community on YouTube, Dev.to, Medium, etc... is limited to articles and tutorials about Ruby / Rails ..."""Compared to some of the other most popular languages"".

Is Ruby Dead?

Top comments (19)

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256hz profile image
Abe Dolinger • Edited

This discussion is never complete without a link to isrubydead.com

I personally find the argument 'X company outgrew Rails, so Ruby is on the way out' a little silly. There are plenty of small and medium-sized businesses that Rails works great for. Most businesses never reach mega-scale, where a big custom solution has the chance of being cost effective in the long term. Ruby is still around the #20 mark on the TIOBE index, and has a fantastic community that's very welcoming and still innovating. Ruby certainly isn't dead, and I think more importantly, doesn't even seem to be dying.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

It’s easy to feel like a language is dying but it’s usually a fallacy.

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justgage profile image
Gage

Lol, love that someone had to execute Ruby code to ask this question 🀣. Next they'll go over to GitHub to execute some more.

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jgaskins profile image
Jamie Gaskins

About 9-10 years ago, there was a relatively small but extremely vocal contingent that were sure that MongoDB and other NoSQL databases were replacing Postgres. Mongo was killing Postgres! SQL was old and busted. NoSQL was the new hotness!

Here we are in 2019 and Postgres is still the primary data store of choice for more web services than any other database.

Other languages are killing Ruby in the same way that MongoDB killed Postgres.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

Except that Ruby has never been "the primary choice for most web services".

Not even close...

How is Ruby not being killed for being a leader it never was?

I don't think Ruby is dead, but the analogy didn't work out from my perspective... Just a friendly feedback on the idea, nothing personal. ;)

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jgaskins profile image
Jamie Gaskins

During the time frame I was talking about, Postgres wasn’t a leading database, either.

Not even close…

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

It's just that you said that in your analogy, so I kept wondering...

Anyway, I guess Ruby isn't dead and that's the takeaway here.

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jgaskins profile image
Jamie Gaskins

Turns out I was wrong, Postgres still isn't a leading database. In fact, it has less than half of the mindshare of each of the top 3.

That makes the analogy even better than either of us gave it credit for.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

Jamie, you've got the best analogy. Case solved! ;)

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itsjzt profile image
Saurabh Sharma

Probably not,

Airbnb, github, kickstarter, basecamp, dev.to, shopify, etc are all using ruby on rails for their backend.

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andrewbrown profile image
Andrew Brown πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦ • Edited

Ruby is neither dead or alive.
Its a construct created by humans to facilitate in the operation of virtual machinery.

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guledali profile image
guledali • Edited

Not dead just not hyped anymore similiar to ember.js or bootstrap en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

You won’t find anything more mature than ruby on rails in web development. It only takes one guy to do two-man jobs.

I think people that used to use ruby a lot were smaller companies, startups and they have now moved on to Node.js, python or something of that nature. Another thing is microservices these days. Backend development has been striped down to only β€œapi mode only” a lot of benefits ruby on rails gives on building web application has reduced which made a lot developer look elsewhere.

Then we have the other problem which is less people are learning multiple languages today particularly javascript developers. Their respond is always why should I learn another language when I can do frontend as well backend in javascript. It’s a lot of that have made ruby less desirable.

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zenitk profile image
Zenit KovačeviΔ‡

I'm a .net Developer and thought so.

However in the last 10 days it showed up 3x:

  • I made my own blog with Jekyll. Turns out it's written in Ruby and I'd need to learn some Ruby if I want to add some fancy stuff
  • Then, I was about to write a blog about Logstash. Turns it it's also written in Ruby and it supports Ruby scripts
  • My neighbor's new dog is called Ruby. Turns out he's a Ruby developer himself :D

So I googled "is ruby dead" and found myself here.

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dfockler profile image
Dan Fockler

I think Ruby is just more mature now, so you don't hear as much fanfare about it, or new ways to solve the same problems. There's still a lot of steady support for both Ruby and Rails and they are proven technologies. On the other side of things there are lots of interesting things going on in the Ruby world. Things like Truffle Ruby, or Sorbet are pushing Ruby to be different which is good for growth.

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stereobooster profile image
stereobooster

I guess Ruby will have second wave of popularity after type checker will be added. A lot of things that Ruby did in the past was copied by other languages, because Ruby community tends to invent elegant solutions (Bundler, RoR, ActiveRecord, Sass, etc.)

Ruby is on the demand, but less popular because other languages drive away popularity from it, for example Elixir, JS+React+GraphQL, etc.

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vidtreon profile image
Delaney Burke • Edited

I am a GenX developer , I have been in this industry over 20+ years. I got into ruby 10 years ago and I moved from 10 years + C# and .net framework. Even back then Ruby was a dying language with no future ( according to my well paid Microsoft invested friends). lol .

I think we should say what we really mean, Ruby is not sexy , young and new!
but having been through a divorce because of some something sexy young and new. those things are definitely overrated !!! LOL

News flash, in my experience the reason that businesses hire developers with new skills on new technology stacks is more about getting them cheap or gullible and idealistic enough to work on the 90% destined to failed projects where they invest money (which they can earn back) and the developers invest time energy that which they cant, while wiser more experienced developers know the value of what we have learned and mastered and don't give it away for free!

So right now I have an amazing life where I do ruby for love fall back to c# for money and learn new stuff that interests me!

so I wait patiently for ruby's demise, so like the Cobol developers in 1999, I will make even more money fixing the stuff that is being built now that no one wants to work on as they all jump ship to other languages!