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Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

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Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#81

Post by joelbluminator »

vr46 wrote: post #21

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…

> I am amazed at how quickly Ruby came and went

It's still here. You decided to switch stacks which is fine, I haven't and I'm doing fine as well. I'm not expecting Ruby jobs to die out in the coming 20 years. There's less of them than there used to be 5 years ago but there are also less developers per job. But yes, Ruby isn't the #1 choice for startups tech anymore. I'm not so sure Node will still be the top choice 5-10 years from now. Or Go. The hype cycle will go on and on. It's only Java that I feel really confident in saying it won't loss any market share, and maybe C.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#82

Post by joelbluminator »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #57
bestinterest wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I agree on the operational aspect in the large scheme of things. Servers are cheap, people are expensive. Thinking out loud here, say you can only serve 200rqs with Rails but 2000rqs in some other framework (yes not fair comparison, endpoints matter etc etc). That means you need 10x the servers but take a step back a sec. 200rqs is 720k a hour or 17,280,00 a day or 518,400,000 requests a month. (The scale fo…

This has always been the argument of people optimising for development speed. Fair argument when you're actually getting dev speed in return. But it's mostly consulting companies making this argument, who don't have any skin in the game for ops cost. If this were true, startups wouldn't be paying a third of the money they raised to AWS.. considerably more than people cost. Companies grow and this 1/10th efficiency wi…

If ops cost are so important why are we all developing micro services now? That's 50 containers instead of one big one, extremely inefficient. Today I learned our 15 devs development environments cost as much as the whole production setup (!) because we each get a whole kubernetes cluster with all the containers. That's quite bonkers. So do we care about ops cost or do we not? I think we don't really.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#83

Post by joelbluminator »

didip wrote: post #56

I think the boat has sailed, particularly on RoR. 1. On the ease to test front, most new languages have built-in easy testing tools. `go test` is so darn easy. These new languages offer less ceremonial type system as well. 2. Most of the new languages are an order of magnitude faster. 3. Newer frameworks have more interesting things to offer. For example, Phoenix on Elixir.

I don't think Go will be huge 10 years from now but maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#84

Post by joelbluminator »

noodle wrote: post #63
ksec wrote: post #62

>I know that many of you will say Ruby is doing fine... You have described what I have been crying about since 2016. Rails is definitely in a negative feedback loop. And I am not even sure if Shopify and Github are enough to pull it out. And there are lots of reddit threads about Junior Ruby Developers unable to find a job. As nearly all jobs are looking for Senior Dev. The only way to solve a problem is to accept it…

> And there are lots of reddit threads about Junior Ruby Developers unable to find a job. As nearly all jobs are looking for Senior Dev. This is true for basically every tech stack though. The pandemic gave a lot of people a chance to change careers, so there's a lot of fresh blood looking for work right now across the board, and not enough space to hire and then mentor them.

This. Juniors will have a hard time in any tech. It's not like employers are gonna be impressed with a junior node dev - wow how special a junior that want's a node job, never met one before. There are millions of javascript developers, maybe tens of millions, it couldn't be any harder to distinguish yourself by learning javascript nowadays.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#85

Post by joelbluminator »

bdcravens wrote: post #36
b20000 wrote: post #19

if nobody uses ruby then why are the devs super expensive? you would think that there is no demand?

ColdFusion devs aren't cheap either, and that's definitely not a popular language these days. It's not that devs are necessary expensive, it's that senior devs are. The problem being that "easy" languages can often lead to complex balls of mud if care is not taken, and the only way forward is to hire senior devs.

My Linkedin shows 37444 Ruby jobs in the U.S to 488 ColdFusion jobs. I don't think this comparison makes sense at all...

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#86

Post by tmm84 »

bdcravens wrote: post #34

> As a startup you're start to think if you made a big mistake choosing Ruby , even if it's easier to build something, being so hard to find affordable developers offsets every advantage you had. I think many Ruby shops go out of their way to be clever. Many apps can "color within the lines". By doing so, you can hire mid-level devs in any language and tool them up on Ruby. Way too many apps have been built in a mann…

This has been my personal experience. I came from a non-RoR background but I have done plenty of programming. The amount of clever solutions advanced ruby-ists come up with can be hard to comprehend and add to that the dynamic module resolution that rails provides it makes for a high amount of mental overhead when reasoning about what something should do when running. I get the whole this is slick and it eliminates boilerplate but that is only if you know what is going on, a new comer or non-ruby programmer is going to be sunk until they figure that out.

I have yet to find a decent book that isn't beginner (here's how to create a rails controller or let's define a class) or super advanced (so you wanna meta-program, hold my beer) on the topic of Ruby. So definitely getting devs up to speed on a Rails project that got clever is an uphill battle unless they are senior.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#87

Post by bdcravens »

joelbluminator wrote: post #85
bdcravens wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ColdFusion devs aren't cheap either, and that's definitely not a popular language these days. It's not that devs are necessary expensive, it's that senior devs are. The problem being that "easy" languages can often lead to complex balls of mud if care is not taken, and the only way forward is to hire senior devs.

My Linkedin shows 37444 Ruby jobs in the U.S to 488 ColdFusion jobs. I don't think this comparison makes sense at all...

The point was whether popularity correlates with pay. Popularity on a given job site neither proves nor disproves that point.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#88

Post by benibela »

b20000 wrote: post #20
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.

As a Pascal developer I have built all my sites in Pascal

Seriously. It is perfect. It gives you C++ like speed, memory safe strings, and near instant compilation

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#89

Post by bdcravens »

b20000 wrote: post #72
bdcravens wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ColdFusion devs aren't cheap either, and that's definitely not a popular language these days. It's not that devs are necessary expensive, it's that senior devs are. The problem being that "easy" languages can often lead to complex balls of mud if care is not taken, and the only way forward is to hire senior devs.

weird. i’ve seen situations where there are very few developers in the world with a specific skill. yet, because there are few companies that need that skill relatively, these developers cannot demand rates higher than rates for developers dealing in vanilla shit like javascript.

The rates might not be higher, but more to the point, their rates aren't lower either. Thus the idea that popularity correlates with pay isn't necessarily true.

Re: Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

#90

Post by mega-tux »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #35
johntdaly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can any language make a comeback to its original popularity? I would argue they can’t because they where overhyped. I’m not interested in getting back to the overhyped level of popularity. That kept me away from Ruby on Rails for a while. But getting to a “mature” point where we can admin, no we are not dying and yes we are one of the better solutions for web development, would be nice. Also the job market adjust to…

Ruby will not make a comback ever again. Maybe as configuration language. We (web dev, UI dev, game dev) need simple, fast stuff, something Go like but better. Maybe Swift? (haven't used Swift). Maybe V will deliver in the end.

Crystal has Ruby similar syntax and Go like speed. Still needs mature a bit more
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