Ruby Together

What makes Ruby a fantastic language is that Ruby code can be structurally beautiful and poetic. It just flows well.

I'll be honest, I'm worried too. I'm a fullstack dev, but I consider myself a decent rubyist. I've been writing it for about 10 years and have spoken at rubyconf a few times. All else being equal, I just like the language itself.

The points others make here are true, there are a ton of ruby shops, and demand for someone with a couple years of rails experience is still quite high.

But the issue is not where ruby is now, but where we see it in the long term. My predicted timeline is something like:

1. Right now, plenty of companies are still being founded on rails. The demand for ruby devs well outstrips the supply. I don't think it's the clear favorite anymore, though, even among trendy SF startups. 2. 5 years from now, far fewer companies will be being founded on ruby. It'll be rare, and mostly just when the founder happens to be a seasoned rubyist. 3. 10 years from now, the supply of rails devs will continue to trend upward, but the demand will have been trending downward for a few years and the good jobs will start to be harder to come by (relative to other tool chains) 4. 15 years from now, Ruby will still be going strong at large companies, but few or no early-stage startups will be using it. It will be seen as stagnant and enterprisy. 5. 20-30 years from now, Ruby will be kind of archaic. The demand for seasoned devs will still be there, but it'll be specialized roles to manage a legacy codebases that drives a lot of revenue and isn't worth replacing in a modern language. There will be few jobs, but also few senior rubyists so the jobs will pay well.

So, honestly, you could pick up ruby today and make a whole career out of it. If you're 25 years old, it might be getting a little tough as you approach retirement, but otherwise you'd be fine.

That said, a lot of people don't really want to work in a language that occupies stage 5. I know I don't want to be limited to only working on ancient codebases. And so I, like a lot of people, am hesitant to go all-in on ruby right now. It seems like it's a little too far down the hype curve to base the next 25 or so years of my career on.

On the other hand, it's certainly possible I'm wrong here. One thesis is that JS fatigue will drive a new wave of developers to Rails. Rails has been betting on that with a bunch of features that, theoretically, allow you to skip a lot of what you'd otherwise need JS for.

Personally, I'm unconvinced. I think the future lies in JS-native tech. Specifically Typescript and an all-in-one Rails-like tool like RedwoodJS or something similar. But then, few of us can really guess how these trends will turn out over the course of long decades. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think a major holdback for Ruby, is how tightly it is coupled to Rails.

Comments like this show how the community, unconscious, ties them together too.

I think for Ruby to truly thrive again, it must become more than 'the language rails was once written in'.

I'm a Ruby developer. I don't particularly like Rails (but don't hate or avoid it either) and I'm more and more convinced that Rails is doing Ruby more harm than good in the long run.

Inline Bundler is a nice way to include gems in a single script file, which proved to be useful for me: https://bundler.io/guides/bundler_in_a_single_file_ruby_scri...