2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

>In the United States, almost 30% of respondents said they deal with a mental health challenge, a higher proportion than other large countries such as the UK, Canada, Germany, or India.

I would be interested to know just how much a higher proportion it was than other countries.

Ruby is a delightful language, but it's dominated by one niche (web development) and one framework (Rails).

Over the last 10-20 years Python has become the main teaching language in Academia. This has greatly contributed to it's ecosystem for math and science, which in turn has contributed to its rise in Data Science and Machine Learning. It also gets a lot of support from Google.

All of these things combined mean that the broad rise of Python is lifting up Python for web development, but if anything I'd say web dev in Python is lagging behind those other uses.

There's one more thing that I think is the root cause of why Rails - the framework - has faded somewhat in the minds of web devs. Rails has always been an opinionated framework, and early on they came up with "The Rails Way" to do front-end assets. The combination of Sass + CoffeeScript + Asset Pipeline with built-in concatenation, minification, and asset hashing was pretty neat compared to the old world of a bunch of es5 files loaded via script tags.

But this hit before the rise of NPM and being able to `require('foo')`.

The JS packaging wars went on for a while and none of those asset solutions are as simple and "just work" as the Rails Asset Pipeline -- but the asset pipeline doesn't hook you into NPM. Rails dragged its feet for a long time on that before adding webpack support.

So I think during that time you had a TON of the trendy hipster open source people moving into Node first on the front end, and then eventually losing interest in Rails because the framework wasn't making it easy for them play in the very latest js ecosystem.

And I think there quickly became some saltyness among Ruby devs about Javascript, that people were overdoing it and that really you only needed "sprinkles" of Javascript to make a great app.

So (1) Python has risen a ton overall, lifting Django, and (2) Rails was slow to embrace the JS craze and that held Rails back.

Those two trends pretty much tell the story as far as I can tell.

We used data from last year’s survey and trends in tags on Stack Overflow to identify which technologies to include on the survey this year. We prioritized popular and fast growing technologies, considering which smaller or shrinking technologies we could remove this year.

So, I think it possibly wasn't listed as an option. Something to consider next time one of these reports is cited as evidence for or against something, as editorial discretion may or may not wildly change the meaning of the less popular items. In this case it may have been the difference between an item being included but lowly ranked and not included at all, which without additional information implies it didn't rank enough to be shown, but I'm not sure if that's the case or not (but I have my doubts that WebAssembly outranks Perl).

Generally it is true that learning a new language, will give one new tools to reason about problems. I find Kotlin and Python amongst the languages I have used, to offer the least new insights and ideas to the student.