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Is Ruby Dying?

jmoses.co

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Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#61

Post by hosh »

mortyseinfeld wrote: post #49
Sanddancer wrote: post #13

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…

First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project Very wrong. There are languages that I believe I would be very productive in, but can't justify the time investment because the community is so small that the related tools/libraries/frameworks aren't there.

That's true if you're considering making something.

On the other hand, if you are learning a language or platform in order to expand your capabilities as a thinker and problem solver, then community size is less of a consideration.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#62

Post by Demiurge »

hahainternet wrote: post #43
sim0n wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally haven't seen any new code being written in Perl during either my time in England or in the Bay Area. I don't really see a reason to use Perl when there are languages like Python and Ruby out there with easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though).

I am in Manchester. I write new Perl code. Python is Perl with a little nicer syntax and a shitload of baggage from overly opinionated people. Ruby is Perl with a little nicer syntax and no other advantages. I have found no compelling reason to switch, and lots of annoyances that don't seem to exist in Perl.

Following this logic, every language is Perl with a bit of this or that. Perl was one of the first of the kind, but people saw obvious problems with it and so they innovated with 'little nicer syntax' or 'little better object system'. You might not want any of this, but you can't deny most people are happier with Python or Ruby.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#63

Post by diminoten »

jhardcastle wrote: post #10

A better title would have be, "Is Ruby Dying? Getting The Data." As others have pointed out, the data suggests no, it is not.

I was taught that if the title of an article or story asks a question, the answer is almost always, "No."

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#64

Post by morganherlocker »

Sanddancer wrote: post #13

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…

> First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project.

I think there is a minimum threshold to this. I support a large application written in an extremely obscure language (it's basically me and 5 other people on an old yahoo mailing list that make up the entire community). It is terrible. No unit testing frameworks, no http framework for rest calls, no decent UI templating, and on and on. 100% of functionality that I need comes in the form of calls to command line tools.

Obviously, Ruby is way past that threshold, so I do not disagree with what you said at all, but just wanted to point out there is a limit. I would not write a new commercial application in any language today that did not already have strong package system. As one person, you can write a few essential modules that you need, but you cannot write all of them.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#65

Post by virtualwhys »

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, impressive.

Ruby should be just fine for the next several years, assume will drop down into the 20s as the static typing + FP movement takes root in the enterprise.

2014 should be a fun year for the JVM: Java 8, Scala 2.11, a possible Kotlin release, and whatever Groovy and Clojure have planned.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#66

Post by monocle »

stonesixone wrote: post #60
Encosia wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With node: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python%20programming%...

I don't think it's comparable to compare the 1-word "nodejs" with the 2-word "xxx programming" phrases.

sans "programming" http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python%2C%20ruby%2C%2...

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#67

Post by bmj »

sim0n wrote: post #39
bmj wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Catalyst? Or Mojolicious? Or Dancer? If it's just used in legacy code, why are there still healthy frameworks being produced (granted, these aren't as popular as Rails, but, Perl on the web is hardly in legacy mode)?

I personally haven't seen any new code being written in Perl during either my time in England or in the Bay Area. I don't really see a reason to use Perl when there are languages like Python and Ruby out there with easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though).

By this measure, C, or C++, or Ruby must be dead, since I've not seen any new code written in it during my 13 years in the industry.

That said, I suspect there are fewer people picking up Perl for the first time for a project these days. My experience with it has always been driven by some degree of "legacy"--someone on the team has experience with the language, and has leveraged CPAN to solve problems. Perl is still my go-to "glue" and tooling language, but that's just because what I know. Would Ruby work? Yeah, probably, but I've not found it to be worth it to learn that language yet.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#68

Post by pswenson »

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....

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#69

Post by laureny »

Touche wrote: post #35
Sanddancer wrote: post #13

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…

> Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important That's the most overstated claim in programming. LESS is the "right tool for the job" when the job is styling web pages. Ruby is a general purpose programming language, the jobs it is good for is everything not covered by DSLs like LESS, the same as all other general purpose languages.

> Ruby is a general purpose programming language

I question that. Ruby is very slow, dynamically typed and suffers from scaling challenges because of its multithreading support.

I think Ruby is increasingly falling into a niche: prototyping. Get a prototype up and running in a few weeks and once the proof of concept is established, switch to a statically typed language on the JVM.

Re: Is Ruby Dying?

#70

Post by dnc »

mess wrote: post #15

Google trends: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python%20programming%...

They are roughly at the same level of google trend popularity if you use just language names (w/o 'programming'):

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python,ruby&cmpt=q

EDIT: This one is maybe more accurate (w/ 'programming' as selected category) and it shows that interest is roughly the same on average: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#cat=0-5-31&q=python,+ru...

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