Ask HN: Will Ruby Get a Comeback?

I know that many of you will say Ruby is doing fine, etc... let me say that regarding jobs and adoption is not that great, especially compared to Python and a few others, without even looking at usage stats.

However, I see some attractive features in Ruby 3, do you think that's enough to get a comeback?

My main concern is jobs availability, as an employer I find it harder and harder to find good RoR developers and they become super expensive. 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’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 node.js community. I loved ActiveJobs and am missing something along that line in node.js and that is not the only example. Since I am a full stack guy I’m also looking forward to what is coming in Rails 7 (making JavaScript simple(r) again) and I’m hopping that Rails will find a way to leverage Ractors in while Ruby continues working on its JIT.

People like us would like to go back to developing in Ruby (and Rails) but we do come with something along the line of 10 years experience in the Industry so no, we are not going to be the cheapest devs out there. And in my case you are going to have about 5 years of Ruby experience and a Year since the last time where I touched Ruby on the Job.

If you can go for multiple Ruby devs I would go with one senior dev that was able to stick around Ruby during the last few years, one returner like me or my friend that has gathered experience outside of Ruby and fill the rest with devs that have one or two years experience any other language that WANT to do Ruby. Nice combination of experience, perspective with the first two (even tough they are going to be more expensive) and some eagerness and enthusiasm for Ruby on a good price point.

Let me be honest. The last years have not been good to the Ruby (and Rails) community. A lot of us left because of golang, node.js, rust, elixir or whatever and so did companies. Ruby had problems and some still exist, especially when it comes to scalability. Problems that most companies will never have but that still hurt us. But the damage has been done. But what we have now is, I think, a good situation for a type of rebirth. A lot of us “switchers” are more then willing to come back but there also needs to be a willingness to not just hire us but also hire more junior devs that want to switch to Ruby and let your senior devs show them the ropes. If enough companies do that I think the Ruby (and Rails) job marked will be back in order in a year or two.

As somebody who jumped ship, I sort of regret it. I tough I could share more code between the backend and the frontend with JavaScript but that sort of died early on when frameworks like Meteor where declared “the wrong way” of doing things. Hell, in the frontend department SPAs where the big thing for a long time and now with frameworks like Next.js we are going back to server side rendering and static pages. We had that with our Rails apps 8 years ago.

I honestly think that a good and modern Ruby team would have somebody like you, somebody like me and two people that want to switch to Ruby because they like the language better.

When it comes to the react/vue dev with some rails skills. Yes I get you, but a lot of those jobs are for people like me. I’ve been doing Ruby (and Rails) about 5 to 6 years of the last 10 years and JavaScript every step of the way for 13 years now (frontend and backend). I fit the full stack role but I honestly don’t believe that you need more than one of us in a Rails team. I would rather split the rest up between ruby/rails devs and javascript/react/vue devs.

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".

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 it would be nice in that it gets used to having people switch to Ruby from other languages again.

The next hype bubble that hits the Ruby community is probably going to be something not related to web development. Look at Python and Machine Learning.