[kiernanmcgowan]

I had the opportunity to run some hackatons / startup coaching last year with some CS student at University of Wisconsin- Madison. I spoke in front of some large lectures and asked students what languages they were learning.

Literally no one out of a few hundred students was learning ruby. Go/nodejs/etherium is what people were putting their energy into.

[conanbatt]

Yeah, rails does look out of style. But node backend development is unpleasant (at least compared to rails).

[kiernanmcgowan]

Agreed - its just interesting to see the next generation of talent completely ignoring a major platform in current tech industry.

[mtberatwork]

I suppose they will be in for a bit of a shock when they try to make their way into the workforce to find out that the majority of enterprise-land is using Java or .Net and a bit of python mixed in.

[BuckRogers]

They shouldn't be surprised, if they're fully informed on the technical and business merits of every platform available. I wouldn't build a business on anything except CoreCLR or Hotspot. C# or Kotlin for me.

I'm just talking out loud here, not to you specifically, but things are the way they are, for good reasons. It's not a "mistake", the way the landscape is today, most technical leads are not sheep. Technical & business requirements have been mulled over time and time again by many thoughtful people, usually leading to these two platforms. A lot of us don't care about what's cool. We demand true technical innovation to adopt a new platform, not technical churn and there's an awful lot of that, if not outright downgrades.

For me, all these things matter.

-Good tooling

-Industrial-strength language design

-Backwards compatibility and support

-Breadth of domains you can target and target well (server-side, desktop, mobile)

-Availability of talent for employers

-Availability of jobs if you're an applicant

[conanbatt]

To be fair, Java/python people probably said the same things to the upcoming rails people at some point.

[collyw]

Perl was more popular then and to be honest most people were impressed at how quickly you could build something.

[diveanon]

Learning a language is trivial, as an educator it is your responsibility to teach them that in order to be a successful developer they should be flexible and well rounded.

Tribalism in tech helps no one.