[bigDinosaur]

I associate Ruby with a particular era of hipster web and app development, ~2007-2010. I don't know why but it's not quite attractive.

That said the serious reason I don't try it out is because I fear it would be like Python, and I don't need two Pythons in my life. If Ruby had been dominant I'd likely be using Ruby and thinking the same of Python.

[JohnBooty]

    a particular era of hipster web and app 
    development, ~2007-2010. I don't know why 
    but it's not quite attractive.

That was a really fun era.

~1997-2007 was fun but it was a mess. It seemed like every project was its own bespoke "framework" and everything was a Java or PHP spaghetti monstrosity.

2007-2014 was the era when "majestic monolith" MVC frameworks with a strong emphasis on automated tests really began to coalesce. Rails led the way here, I think. It was a brief island of sanity if you ask me. MVC may not be perfect but it's a fine choice most of the time for anything CRUD.

I suppose there was kind of a "hipster" aesthetic around Ruby/Rails (Ruby devs kind of prided themselves on being quirky or whatever, as opposed to staid corporate Java drones, I guess?) but I did not find it to really be a factor.

2015-present has been a nightmare. Nearly every web application is now two apps: front and back-end. For apps with highly interactive UIs this is an obvious win but for the vast majority of web applications it has been a disaster. User-facing performance of the modern web is awful and I have never felt less productive as a developer. Every developer thinks they need to do things "like Amazon" or "like Facebook" and just.... no. The Javascript community has absolutely lost all connection with sanity and the era of the full-stack developer is over.

[pjmlp]

During that timeframe, I dismissed Ruby/Rails for similar reasons.

First of all, regardless of what everyone says regarding how "inovative" Rails was, Tcl and Python did it first, with AOLServer and Zope.

During the .com wave, I was part of a startup with a product for CMS development, that was basically inspired from AOLServer, although we did our own thing.

It supported Windows 2000/NT, Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux (only for dev purposes), SQL Server (Sybase and Microsft variants), Informix, Oracle, Access (only as demo concept), and we were in the process of adding DB 2 support as well.

We went down in the .com crash, and Lisbon isn't SV, so hardly anyone heard of us, but it doesn't change the fact we were already better than Rails v1.0 in 1999.

Second, I know Python since version 1.6, so Ruby hardly brings anything other to the party than a Smalltalk inspired workflow, without the IDE experience.

[taf2]

Yeah it is definitely from that era 2007~ ruby though is like the friendly python. Dependency’s usually just work and it doesn’t get mad at your style - it’s very accepting and importantly IMO the stack traces are much easier to use to identify the root cause of a bug compared to python …

[Xylakant]

I do think the same thing about python. The occupy a ver similar space and I already know ruby, so I have very limited incentive to start doing stuff in python. But that doesn’t mean I dislike it, or believe it’s a bad language.