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Is Ruby Dying?

jmoses.co

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Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#71

Post by dham »

virtualwhys wrote: post #65

TIOBE index for December 2013 says otherwise: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... Ruby dropped 3 spots from this time last year (currently #13); if it is dying, it's dying slowly. For my work on the JVM, Scala in comparison is way down at spot #31; Groovy #47, and Clojure doesn't even break the top 50. Meanwhile F# is kicking some serious azz, soaring 27 spots in a single year to #20, impr…

I used to look at the TIOBE index all the time, until I saw Visual Basic .NET jump a bunch of spots this year. I then started to question either TIOBE index or the people that are using Visual Basic.NET

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#72

Post by dham »

pswenson wrote: post #68
dham wrote: post #41

NodeJS, been there done that. Even with generators it makes doing task synchronously a royal pain(have you ever tried to write sql update code with transactions?). Until something comes a long to replace Ruby( https://github.com/mirah/mirah looks promising), I'll still use it. Ruby is a great scripting language, and it has one of the best(if not the best), web frameworks out there. I definitely think MRI will die, an…

Mirah has almost zero usage, and it seems very little development is going on there. I'm on the Mirah google group and there have been 5 posts since October. I love the idea, but it seems few are interested....

Exactly. That proves my point. There are no Ruby like languages ready to replace Ruby right now.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#73

Post by lstamour »

jerf wrote: post #29
polysics wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you reckon could not be legacy code in 15 years? C family, Java, maybe Erlang?

I expect the JVM to still be going; at least one of Clojure or Scala will probably continue growing for a long time, and there's room for both. It's also possible another Algol-esque language that isn't Java, but is syntactically closer to Java, making people more comfortable, will arise. At some point one of them may even become the "primary" JVM language, with Java hanging on as legacy, but due to the fact Java jus…

For a Google-backed language to replace Rails, Golang has less of a shot IMHO. Mainly because the popularity of Rails stemmed initially from TextMate in the original screencasts. It'd be silly to say that's all that mattered so I'm going to merely strongly imply that without additional books or cookbooks, screen casts, etc. it's hard to see Golang taking off in a community that isn't already invested in learning it. Those looking for more stability will pick a JVM-based language, which includes JRuby, and call it a day.

If I had to then pick a replacement, I would argue for Dart. Dartlang has a much stronger set of novice documentation, nodejs-like magic of running in client and server, but advanced Google mojo like support for SIMD. All Dart really needs is Chrome support and a decent "Rails" clone to popularize server-side development. We're a few years off, but Dart could be quite exciting. Or it could end up running on the JVM like everything else :p

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#74

Post by kailuowang »

> What do you guys think? Is Ruby dying? Did you once use Ruby and have now started to use something else?

I was using Ruby as my main language for 3 years before I switched to first Coffeescript and then Scala now. Personally I prefer the simplicity (a function is a function) of Coffeescript and the richness (so many things to fool around) of Scala over Ruby.

The popularity of languages don't die over the course of a couple of years. Projects with legacy code rely on them and maintenance of their libraries. And legacy code is very very hard to kill.

If the interest is in finding out the trend of the "favorability" of a language, it might be more accurate to survey how many green field software products(not libraries, which could be driven by the need of improving some legacy code) are choosing it. Unfortunately, such survey is more expensive to perform, and might be close to impossible to perform retrospectively to understand the trend. Given the fact that the "popularity" of a language isn't that important, the favorability is probably even less, such survey is probably hard to justify.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#75

Post by dham »

lstamour wrote: post #73
jerf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the JVM to still be going; at least one of Clojure or Scala will probably continue growing for a long time, and there's room for both. It's also possible another Algol-esque language that isn't Java, but is syntactically closer to Java, making people more comfortable, will arise. At some point one of them may even become the "primary" JVM language, with Java hanging on as legacy, but due to the fact Java jus…

For a Google-backed language to replace Rails, Golang has less of a shot IMHO. Mainly because the popularity of Rails stemmed initially from TextMate in the original screencasts. It'd be silly to say that's all that mattered so I'm going to merely strongly imply that without additional books or cookbooks, screen casts, etc. it's hard to see Golang taking off in a community that isn't already invested in learning it.…

AFAIK Dart still does not have generators. I want to like Dart but if puts me in the same boat as Javascript does on the server, then NO.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#76

Post by mountaineer »

virtualwhys wrote: post #65

TIOBE index for December 2013 says otherwise: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... Ruby dropped 3 spots from this time last year (currently #13); if it is dying, it's dying slowly. For my work on the JVM, Scala in comparison is way down at spot #31; Groovy #47, and Clojure doesn't even break the top 50. Meanwhile F# is kicking some serious azz, soaring 27 spots in a single year to #20, impr…

Ruby is still holding its own in he HN hiring trends too[1]

[1] http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2013/...

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#77

Post by steveklabnik »

jerf wrote: post #29
polysics wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you reckon could not be legacy code in 15 years? C family, Java, maybe Erlang?

I expect the JVM to still be going; at least one of Clojure or Scala will probably continue growing for a long time, and there's room for both. It's also possible another Algol-esque language that isn't Java, but is syntactically closer to Java, making people more comfortable, will arise. At some point one of them may even become the "primary" JVM language, with Java hanging on as legacy, but due to the fact Java jus…

> Someone will probably be writing an OS kernel in Rust.

There are two or three of these, at least at the stage where kmain is Rust code. I'd be really excited to see this develop further.

I just don't have time for ever project I'd like to do :/

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#78

Post by danielrhodes »

jerf wrote: post #29
polysics wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you reckon could not be legacy code in 15 years? C family, Java, maybe Erlang?

I expect the JVM to still be going; at least one of Clojure or Scala will probably continue growing for a long time, and there's room for both. It's also possible another Algol-esque language that isn't Java, but is syntactically closer to Java, making people more comfortable, will arise. At some point one of them may even become the "primary" JVM language, with Java hanging on as legacy, but due to the fact Java jus…

I like Go, but in my opinion it is not an appropriate language for building web applications. It makes for great sub-components of a larger stack which are focused and do relatively low-level tasks (networking, file serving, caching, etc.). It is also great for scripting where you need easy out-of-the-box concurrency.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#79

Post by weatherlight »

danso wrote: post #12

Ugh...must not take Lord's name in vain. 14 points in almost as many minutes? Is it so easy to get to the top of HackerNews on a holiday with such a loaded question? I can't imagine how many points the OP would've gotten if the title was "Is Ruby Dying Faster than MongoDB?" That said, as a pro-Rubyist...well, I don't find much comfort in the OP's spurious assumptions about what the data can show. However, for those w…

Ruby IS dying faster than MongoDB! Evidence to prove it! http://bit.ly/1c9vo1S

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#80

Post by steveklabnik »

virtualwhys wrote: post #65

TIOBE index for December 2013 says otherwise: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... Ruby dropped 3 spots from this time last year (currently #13); if it is dying, it's dying slowly. For my work on the JVM, Scala in comparison is way down at spot #31; Groovy #47, and Clojure doesn't even break the top 50. Meanwhile F# is kicking some serious azz, soaring 27 spots in a single year to #20, impr…

TIOBE results for Ruby won't be the same just quite yet, because December 25 is the traditional Ruby release date. Ruby will get a lot of press over the next week that's still in December, but wouldn't be counted yet.
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