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Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

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Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#11

Post by kinduff »

Ruby and Rails Engineer here, for a decade now.

I had the fortune to be part of new startups that chose RoR for all the good reasons, but also because at the time it was trendy.

Nowadays I keep finding RoR jobs but I see more and more legacy applications that need to be maintained in order to move to a new technology.

I've had some discussions with founders and they always mention the same problem: there are not a lot of Ruby developers or they are expensive. So they choose to go with another technology, aka Javascript.

I like the language but I like others more, but Ruby brings bread to my table and I'm sure it will keep providing as long as Ruby engineers become founders or companies keep mantaining legacy projects built with the tecnology.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#12

Post by bradleyankrom »

Anecdotal, but in my industry (sports front office), we’ve seen a heavy shift from Rails to Python over the last few years. I don’t think it’s much to do with perceived shortcomings with Ruby/Rails, but rather alignment with what the analytics side of operations uses. Front office R&D groups (typically comprised of systems and analytics) are relatively small, and there’s a fair amount of collaboration between devs and analysts. The Ruby ecosystem doesn’t offer the data science tooling that Python does, so it has been easier for devs to align with analysts (by using Django, Flask, etc) than the other way around.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#13

Post by celeduc »

What sold me on Ruby/Rails in the first place was its comprehensive test and deployment framework that worked out-of-the-box without having to make too many choices or develop those things independently. That was truly revolutionary.

But everything else eventually caught up and surpassed the Ruby/Rails ecosystem on the requirements->deployment pipeline, and did a lot of other things better.

I have a real soft spot for Ruby but I won't be back.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#14

Post by [deleted] »

jstx1 wrote: post #7

Meta question - has any language ever made a comeback? Not in terms of quality or features (many have had significant improvements obviously) but in terms of adoption and getting back to the spot of "this is one of the go-to languages to do x".

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#15

Post by nicoburns »

johntdaly wrote: post #3

I’m a Ruby (and Rails) developer and currently write node.js code. A friend of mine that I worked with that is also a Ruby (and Rails) developer is currently working as a Python developer. I am more than willing to switch back and so is my friend. Ruby (and Rails) was fun to us and that is lacking in our current jobs. I personally am stunned when I compare the developments in Rails to the developments I see in the no…

I think the main problem for Ruby isn't Node.js, go, Rust, etc. None of those ecosystems have anything comparable to Rails. The problem is Laravel (PHP) and Django (Python) which both offer a comparable (if not better in many ways) experience to Rails with access to much bigger ecosystems.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#16

Post by izietto »

bradleyankrom wrote: post #12

Anecdotal, but in my industry (sports front office), we’ve seen a heavy shift from Rails to Python over the last few years. I don’t think it’s much to do with perceived shortcomings with Ruby/Rails, but rather alignment with what the analytics side of operations uses. Front office R&D groups (typically comprised of systems and analytics) are relatively small, and there’s a fair amount of collaboration between devs an…

May I ask you what are the tools and/or features that Python offers and Ruby does not? It'd be interesting to invest resources on it, given that Python is not very different from Ruby

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#17

Post by Zababa »

I think part of the answer to that would be "What replaced Ruby, and why?".

You can start here with Rails. I know that React technically "replaced" it, at least in popularity, but React is a frontend framework. Rails has a notion of views, and React probably replaced that, but I have no idea what happened to the model and controller. Express is very popular, but it's very thin compared to Rails. There doesn't seem to be any dominant database library. Some people are probably using Firebase, Hasura or some other "managed backend". But there is no "Rails but in JS". Maybe web development itself changed? Maybe it's harder to start out with Rails than it was a decade ago, so less people do it? Maybe the deployment/scaling experience wasn't good? Maybe Rails doesn't scale with the number of developers (microservices and things like that) so even if lots of products are still made with it, bigger products employs way more developers so we hear more about what they use?

The other thing that seemed very popular in Ruby was scripts and dev tools. I think Go ate a big part of the dev tools market, especially the ones you distribute as a CLI. For scripts, I have no idea. Python has always been popular here. Maybe with the rise of JS, people are writing their scripts in JS too? Maybe bash made a return?

I personally missed the Rails wave, and I feel like people are still trying to get back the productivity of good backend MVC frameworks. The most common advice given here to someone starting a web project that doesn't know what to use seems to be "use a popular MVC framework in a language that you know that generates HTML server-side". So there is still a need for stuff like Rails. The question now would be, why Rails instead of any other? From what I've heard, Django, Laravel, Spring, ASP.NET all offer a similar experience.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#18

Post by recursivedoubts »

I have been working in RoR for a long time and, yes, it is being surpassed by other languages/frameworks, particularly python and, obviously, javascript.

However, I think we are turning the corner on javascript-everywhere movement and that html-driven development is poised to make a big comeback:

https://htmldriven.dev/

With the adoption of html-driven tools like hotwire, unpoly or my own project, htmx, the choice of back-end becomes more open ended because any language can produce server side HTML, and usually pretty well.

My hope is that, with this development, platforms like RoR, php and even haskell[1] will gain new life in web development.

[1] - https://thisweek.htmx.org/issue/3/

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#20

Post by b20000 »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #18

I have been working in RoR for a long time and, yes, it is being surpassed by other languages/frameworks, particularly python and, obviously, javascript. However, I think we are turning the corner on javascript-everywhere movement and that html-driven development is poised to make a big comeback: https://htmldriven.dev/ With the adoption of html-driven tools like hotwire, unpoly or my own project, htmx, the choice of…

great news. as a c++ developer i have long considered building sites server side in c++ so i do not have to learn anything else.
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