I am amazed at how quickly Ruby came and went. I started working with Ruby around 2004, made a decent career with it for a long time but bailed out at the very end of 2015 after the roles really weren't all that, rates weren't going up and it was pretty clear that things were no longer growing. Basically, the previous two roles at this point were very much about coding to an existing monolith that was being broken up and replaced with Java microservices.
Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
#22if nobody uses ruby then why are the devs super expensive? you would think that there is no demand?
> nobody uses ruby
You've shown this must be false, but it seems that only you said it.
Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
#23Ruby 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 lo…
"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."
This is exactly the situation with a number of long-standing, formerly popular languages. ColdFusion and PHP jump to mind. They're fine languages and people love them, but if no one's paying, why bother sticking to them? Loving a programming language doesn't pay the bills.
"I'm sure it will keep providing as long as Ruby engineers become founders or companies keep maintaining legacy projects built with the technology."
My previous employer was maintaining over 30 acquired company's worth of legacy code bases. They replaced common functionality via new microservices and would sometimes replace an entire product via a new acquisition. It's sometimes a better ROI to replace instead of maintaining or building.
Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
#24Meta 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".
If you believe the TIOBE index, the popularity of python peaked around 2008-2009 and then slid to a low around 2014-2015 -- and now it's more popular than it's ever been.
https://www.notonlycode.org/content/images/2020/09/Screensho...
Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
#25Meta 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".
If you believe the TIOBE index, the popularity of python peaked around 2008-2009 and then slid to a low around 2014-2015 -- and now it's more popular than it's ever been. https://www.notonlycode.org/content/images/2020/09/Screensho...
> If you believe the TIOBE index
I don't. I don't think anyone else should either. TIOBE counts number of hits returned by a weighted selection of search engines when you search for " programming" - it's a useless metric.
Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
#26Meta 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".
I would put python in this category.
Back in the RoR days, python had a very second class status in the web community. There were some famous web 2.0 companies that are using django. All the limelight was on Rails.
These days, python is probably the second most popular langauge for after JavaScript in number of repos and maybe the go-to language for first time Devs.
(Thanks to Zed Shaw)
And there are significantly more people doing web app dev with Python now than with Ruby
Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
#27I’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.
I sort of see where you are coming from but as somebody that used PHP in the past and has left I can’t really get myself to look there.
Now when it comes to Python and Django I’m not so sure. I’ve read a couple of articles where some of the Django users where annoyed that in their opinion there isn’t enough development/new stuff in the Django.
Personally I think the biggest problem is that none of the MVC frameworks in other languages are all that bad and Rails has the problem that it is not better enough for you to have an incentive to learn the language JUST for Rails anymore.
I personally currently see the type of progress I want to see in a backend framework in Rails and in Phoenix (elixir) and I don’t think the changes that are coming are big enough to entice people away from another language just for the framework.
But for me learning Ruby was unexpectedly fun. I come from a Python background, but back then there weren't any Python or Django jobs where I lived at so I did PHP instead. I also learned quickly that JavaScript would be huge so I deep dived into that. When I got fed up with PHP (T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM) I did find a job with Ruby on Rails and Ruby clicked hard, in a way it never had before.
So yea, I don’t think we will win anything based on the Rails framework, but Ruby is fun and the community is a bit weird and that is majorly attractive, especially after you’ve been working as programmer for a couple of years and it becomes important again to Squeeze all the fun out of the job you can.
Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
#28Ruby is dead, dont bring back the dead.
Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
#29I 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…
I was a Servlet and JSP developer. I really miss it. I liked it. I was good at it.
Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?
#30Anecdotal, 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
Python has numpy and native bindings to Fortran. People often think of Fortran as archaic, but its math libraries are quite fast. With Python bindings, you don't need to write any Fortran in order to have access to those libraries.
Mind you, this is useless for web dev and a lot of other things, but that's still what has tipped the scales for many people.