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I think part of the answer to that would be "What replaced Ruby, and why?". You can start here with Rails. I know that React technically "replaced" it, at least in popularity, but React is a frontend framework. Rails has a notion of views, and React probably replaced that, but I have no idea what happened to the model and controller. Express is very popular, but it's very thin compared to Rails. There doesn't seem to be any dominant database library. Some people are probably using Firebase, Hasura or some other "managed backend". But there is no "Rails but in JS". Maybe web development itself changed? Maybe it's harder to start out with Rails than it was a decade ago, so less people do it? Maybe the deployment/scaling experience wasn't good? Maybe Rails doesn't scale with the number of developers (microservices and things like that) so even if lots of products are still made with it, bigger products employs way more developers so we hear more about what they use? The other thing that seemed very popular in Ruby was scripts and dev tools. I think Go ate a big part of the dev tools market, especially the ones you distribute as a CLI. For scripts, I have no idea. Python has always been popular here. Maybe with the rise of JS, people are writing their scripts in JS too? Maybe bash made a return? I personally missed the Rails wave, and I feel like people are still trying to get back the productivity of good backend MVC frameworks. The most common advice given here to someone starting a web project that doesn't know what to use seems to be "use a popular MVC framework in a language that you know that generates HTML server-side". So there is still a need for stuff like Rails. The question now would be, why Rails instead of any other? From what I've heard, Django, Laravel, Spring, ASP.NET all offer a similar experience. |
A lot of the people that I knew from that time had already switched to Sinatra for their non work related projects.
As simple as Rails was compared to what came before it (J2EE), it was still complex in ways and people felt Sinatra was simpler.
When node.js started gaining traction and people realised that they could write front-end and back-end both in the same language, people went in troves to node.js. All popular Ruby projects like passport and Passenger had a node.js version. Some others had a node equivalent quickly put together.
Some rubyists that I knew also took the route of writing everything in (a very Ruby like language called) coffeescript and compiled it to js before running it on node although this didn't last long.
For me as a kid, Rails taught me a lot of things: MVC, db migrations,relationships, HTTP and REST for which I'm grateful.
But I don't see myself using Rails again because we have tooling now that makes me more productive or atleast feel that way.