[arp242]

Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times. Based on that, it seems the reports of Ruby's decline are not as bad as sometimes claimed.

If you look at PostgreSQL then a lot of dev work comes from EnterpriseDB and a handful of companies too.

The thing with Rails is that it doesn't scale terrible well to "Twitter scale" (if I'm not mistaken Twitter has dropped all usage of Rails) so there aren't that many well-known companies running it, but the overwhelming majority of companies are not "Twitter scale" and it's not really an issue for them. There's a long list of smaller outfits that are not in the "top 50" using Rails quite happily.

People focus too much on "What is {Twitter,Facebook,Google,Amazon,Netflix,...} doing?" Who cares? You're never going to have the same problems they have. And whatever they are doing is not necessarily representative for the entire industry.

[freedomben]

> The thing with Rails is that it doesn't scale terrible well to "Twitter scale"

It's true that Twitter switch to JVM langs, but it's not true that Ruby doesn't scale (or couldn't have to Twitter's level if they'd kept it). Twitter was early days for Ruby and things have improved a lot, but the only scaling challenge with Ruby is the cost of app instances. I use Elixir/Phoenix now and run 1/4 of the app instances I used to and with much less memory required per instance. (in one app it's 1/10 the ruby instances!) It's traditionally opex cost that hurt Ruby scalability, not technical, and very few companies will ever see the level of success where the cost of servers gets prohibitively high (compared to dev dev cost).

[arp242]

Isn't "it's comparatively slow" what people usually mean with "doesn't scale"? You can scale anything with enough hardware, but as you mentioned at some point is just becomes very expensive.

[vidarh]

Twitters architecture at the time was a textbook example of how not to build a large scale many-to-many social network. Maybe switching would've been worth it for them anyway, but the big thing they needed was fixing architectural choices they never should've made to start with.

[byroot]

> Isn't "it's comparatively slow" what people usually mean with "doesn't scale"?

If that's the case, then they are misguided.

> You can scale anything with enough hardware

No, some architectures or implementations can give you diminishing returns or a hard cap. Not everything can scale horizontally ad infinitum.

[lagniappe]

> Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times.

This furthers the point. By stating a lot of companies are looking for Ruby (something that doesn't match my experience when looking) is not a testament that it is hot and in-demand, it is a testament that those roles are not being filled. Senior devs don't make senior dev money doing junior dev work. My assertion is that the majority of Rails is CRUD development that only gets difficult when you step off the golden path- ergo, those positions go unfilled and outnumber their statistical representation in what would be called 'production Rails applications'

[arp242]

What does "hot and in-demand" even mean, exactly? All I'm saying is that based on my (admittedly limited and vague) dataset there seem to be plenty of companies happily running on Ruby (some with Rails, some without) and that "FAANG-type companies we all heard of aren't using it that much any more" doesn't actually mean all that much.

I'm not really sure what your point about senior/junior devs or "roles are not being filled" is.

(aside: please don't delete your post and post exactly the same identical post again to clear the downvotes on it).

[cultofmetatron]

twitter was never a good fit for rails anyway. twitter is basically a human pubsub at scale. Rail's bread and butter are simple crud based apps with nonlinear use patterns.