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Is Ruby Dying?

jmoses.co

21–30 of 159 posts

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#21

First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project. Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important, new kid in town be damned. Second off, number of package releases doesn't tell much about maturity of packages, developer involvement, or anything. Ruby's a mature language. It's quite feasible, and arguably desirable, for package releases t…

For all that, the more popular a language is the more packages are available and the easier it is to avoid reinventing the wheel and save time and effort.

Even the wrong tool for the job is a nice choice if someone's already done the work of making a square peg fit a round hole for you.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#22
post #17
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think what jerf means is that, being mostly used as a scripting and web language, it's easy to create legacy code in it. Remember ColdFusion? PHP 3? However, more to your point, there's legacy C and Java code, but that's because those languages have evolved heavily in their time, so late 90s Java looks little like modern Java, and techniques used in C in the 80s would get you laughed at today. Hell, even in my main…

That's pretty fascinating...I studied C in college and didn't hate it (in fact, I'd like to go back to C some day)...but my perception since has been that not much has changed because not much needs to change. I'd love to see a paper or article looking at innovations or change in practices in these older languages.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#24
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…

Cannot agree more with you on that last comment. I personally think - and hope, as a full-time Ruby dev at this moment - that Ruby will "recide" (big quotes here) to a more "humble" spot as a glue language; i.e. Perl's spot 10-15 years ago.

Not a bad spot to be in if I may say so.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#25
Ruby is only dying in the sense that C is dead. It's not that exciting, but instead is widely used, including by companies.

Additionally, I doubt gem releases correlate with language 'vitality'. Fewer releases may simply indicate library stability.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#26
post #4

You just may not be used to Ruby not having the exciting fire of initial hype. That is dead. But that's good. Languages can't live like that forever. Sooner or later they need to stop the wild experimenting, find some best practices and things that work, and settle down and ram home the things that work. Ruby has entered final maturity. It will be in that phase until such time as it really does die, which could well…

This is it. I'm blown away by how productive I am with rails now. A couple of weeks back I replaced an entire backend, complete with an oauth provider, record versioning, caching etc. and it took 4 hours! And all done with the usual TDD etc. This is all thanks to the gems that are available. Most of them are 2nd or 3rd generation, they're focused, battle tested and well documented. It might not be the right tool for every job but it's damn good at what it does. If the noise has died down it's because we're busy knocking out great apps.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#28
post #4

You just may not be used to Ruby not having the exciting fire of initial hype. That is dead. But that's good. Languages can't live like that forever. Sooner or later they need to stop the wild experimenting, find some best practices and things that work, and settle down and ram home the things that work. Ruby has entered final maturity. It will be in that phase until such time as it really does die, which could well…

I think Perl has already reached the state where it's mostly used in legacy code, at least for web development.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#29
post #7
post #4

You just may not be used to Ruby not having the exciting fire of initial hype. That is dead. But that's good. Languages can't live like that forever. Sooner or later they need to stop the wild experimenting, find some best practices and things that work, and settle down and ram home the things that work. Ruby has entered final maturity. It will be in that phase until such time as it really does die, which could well…

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 just compiles to the JVM, there won't be any reason to get rid of it, as the maintenance effort is virtually 0. I expect C# to probably still be going. I'm not sure anything can actually kill C, even though something really should.

C++ I can see going either way; it is a freakishly complicated language (and getting more complicated with every standard that comes out) that IMHO was primarily kept aloft by being the "default" language in Windows for a very long time. I expect Rust will be most of the way through eating it alive in 15 years. Or something like Rust, but Rust is looking pretty solid. And if you want a multithreaded systems language... and you will... I suspect in practice it's going to be an order of magnitude easier to program in than C++ in another three or four years. Maybe Rust will even be eating C. (About damn time!) Someone will probably be writing an OS kernel in Rust. Possibly one that is driver-compatible with Linux, or even just straight-up a Linux-compatible kernel.

If Google doesn't drop the ball, Go will probably be mature and still going, and probably the primary reason why Ruby and friends are considered legacy code. Go even today very nearly replaces the scripting languages in flexibility (though definitely not quite), but brings back stronger typing and better performance. A few more tweaks to it over the next 5 years and it'll be hard to see why I'd start a new project in a "scripting" language. (Part of the reason I think this is that I observe that in the past 15 years, no language has penetrated into the A-list without some sort of major corporate backer. While there's plenty of other possibilities from a technical point of view, and while Google is not very aggressively pushing Go, I still think it's more support than any other language has or is likely to have in the near future. Even if they just passively continue to do little more than employ the authors, this is likely to continue floating up the ranks.)

And I still sort of expect something to come up that is not Haskell, but is closer to Haskell than anything currently existing. Or possible Haskell simply keeps plugging along and manages to become a very solid B-list language. I doubt it'll ever break into the A-list "nobody got fired for choosing C/C++/Java/C#" level of popularity, but it might settle firmly into where "it's pretty hard to get fired for choosing Python/Ruby/PHP" is today. (It's brushing B-list status now, but it's got a ways to go before I'd call it solid B-list.) I also think there's a good chance it will acquire a reputation as being the tool of choice for tackling truly complicated systems. (Though Rust will eat into the bottom end of that a bit too, they're currently retreating from some of the tools that Haskell has that may allow it to acquire this reputation. I think Haskell will still retain a strong advantage here.)

And finally, some sort of wildcard. 15 years ago I doubt anybody would have predicted Haskell being where it is now, even Haskell users (if you can even call it the same l. New languages shall continue to bubble and froth, but at least one and probably two will either emerge from the froth and become a B-list language. Probably at least one of them will be a aggressively "practical" language that will be a reaction to the success of "excessively-academic" Clojure, Scala, Rust, and the Haskell-like I hypothesize above, and follow a hype curve very similar to Ruby or Node.

It occurs to me I'm looking more like 10 years into the future here than 15. Oh well. Close enough. I'm also well aware I'm just talking out my ass; I completely expect to look back and laugh at this in 10 to 15 years. Oh well again.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#30

I didn't start using Ruby (or Rails) until this year. The language is nice and makes my top 3 language list. That said, I find both Python/Django and Node.js both more productive than Rails for quickly building API-driven web-apps. More so this has to do with Rails, which has a number of warts and a tendency to require excessive configuration for all its pretty much patently false 'convention over configuration' spie…

What is the criteria for being "the new PHP"? Do you mean that it will be used for the same kinds of projects as PHP is currently used for, or by the same types of developers or ...?
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