[berkes]

> A "community" begins with one person doing the thing.

And a community thrives with many one-persons combining their effort and keep doing so.

I have made many libraries (gems), OpenSource. Some paid, many just for the benefit of this community; your implication that I lament but not put my work and effort up is frankly rather offending.

To continue on this lament: libraries in dynamic languages are rather hard to maintain, due to runtime constraints that progress/change over time. And the one thing I see is a dwindling usage. Less issues filed (good! ;), less downloads, less integrations, less praise, etc etc.

The more I pay attention, the more I see the Ruby community dwindling. I hope this is merely Rails dwindling - I frankly won't mind if Rails is replaced -, but I fear that Ruby = Rails in practicality. And that Ruby is on the way to the COBOL or Perl.

This, I lament, because I think Ruby is, in the niche of dynamic scripting languages, by far the nicest, cleanest and fun to work with. It's tooling and syntax far more consistent and sensible than Pythons. It's concepts far better thought out and much nicer executed than PHPs. And, sorry, everything can be better than JavaScript without much effort.

So, to me it makes no sense to make Ruby the next Python or PHP, because it's already much better, IMO. It's just not used as often. One extra person using it, doesn't change that.

And, it makes even less sense to make Ruby more like Go or Rust, because if I need Rust, I'd pick Rust instead of spending years of my life making Ruby more like Rust (i.e. invest in a type system, some compile stuff etc).

And when I need e.g. WASM runtime (in say serverless functions) or integration of some new fancy SAAS, or LangChain alike tooling, why would I poor months or years of effort into building tooling to compile to WASM, build gems around said SAAS, or help with tools like Transformers for Ruby, when I can pick Go or Rust to compile to wasm today, grab the Typescript package for the SAAS today, or learn, use (and dislike) Langchain in python today as well?

[vidarh]

My desktop is almost all Ruby. Ruby is not going away for decades.

I've just started replacing my shell with a shell in Ruby too. To me one of the nice things about Ruby is that I feel like I can get things done so easily it doesn't matter if the community is smaller. Almost all the code I use apart from the kernel, Chrome and Xorg is now my own.

[lambdaba]

Do tell us more on how you use Ruby everywhere? I use Ruby exclusively for scripts (I love built-in inline deps with bundler/inline).

[vidarh]

My X11 window manager is pure Ruby: https://github.com/vidarh/rubywm That was posted to HN a while back. It's a minimalist tiling wm.

My file manager is (very simplistic, I do most of my actual file management from the shell - it's in effect mostly a desktop launcher) Ruby

It, as well as my desktop switcher (also Ruby) depends on pure Ruby X11 bindings, and a pure Ruby TrueType font renderer:

  https://github.com/vidarh/skrift
  https://github.com/vidarh/skrift-x11
  https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11

So does my Ruby terminal (what's on Github is nothing like the full version, which I will package up and push one of these days).

My editor is also pure Ruby, using Rouge (Ruby; not mine) for syntax highlighting. That also needs a major update on Github - what's there probably won't even run for others because my personal "ecosystem" on my system is full of helpers and these things are written to be as minimalist as possible so e.g. my editors "file open" dialog is a 2-3 line wrapper around dmenu.

And I've just replaced my shell with Ruby - but that's just for interactive use, so it's very tiny.

[lambdaba]

Very cool, thanks. I'd switch to a Ruby WM in a heartbeat if it worked on Wayland.

[vidarh]

Unfortunately, that's a vastly larger job than an X11 wm because you're either implementing a full display server or need to create bindings to something like Wlroots - under X the wm is close to just another client of the X server.