[IshKebab]

> Shopify, Stripe, and GitHub

Yeah I mean Facebook, Wordpress, Wikipedia... but are you going to start a new project in PHP today? I bet all of them wish they weren't using Ruby. (Well probably not because they'll attract devs that love Ruby, but you get the point...)

Anyway in terms of concrete numbers the best thing I've found is to look at Github PRs/projects/stars. This site is really cool: https://madnight.github.io/githut/

Ruby was quite popular at the start of the chart in 2014 when it was more popular than Java! But gradually waned until about 2020 where it seems to have stabilised at "not very popular", just behind PHP.

Go and Typescript seem to have taken its place, which makes sense because they're both much better languages.

[dismalaf]

> I bet all of them wish they weren't using Ruby.

I've never heard any entrepreneur say they wish they didn't use Ruby... Nothing I've ever seen gets you from zero to a fully working CRUD website nearly as quickly.

The only people who say such things are the ones who didn't pick it.

[fredoliveira]

> I bet all of them wish they weren't using Ruby.

I'd take that bet. At scale, (and those 3 are the definition of scale) you can mitigate some of the downsides of Ruby (i.e. speed), but you can't recreate the upsides (i.e. developer satisfaction, learning curve, flexibility) elsewhere.

> Go and Typescript seem to have taken its place, which makes sense because they're both much better languages.

Again: depends on the metrics you're considering. I would certainly consider Go much better than ruby on some metrics, but most definitely not all - and importantly, if I put all of it on a scale (and this is where bias comes in), I still give the edge to Ruby over both of those.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Heh, not the person you were replying to, but I do not find the list of upsides compelling. These products at scale are mature (minus everyone’s list of personal bugs and misfeatures). Who cares how easy it is to pick up the language or developer happiness? A stricter language with more hard guarantees makes it possible to make changes to a big code base without fear.

[fredoliveira]

Fair! And yep, I too wish Ruby was stricter. I just happen to value it slightly less than some of the things I do get with the language.

[dismalaf]

> Who cares how easy it is to pick up the language or developer happiness?

Someone who's building a startup. Time to market and not succumbing to the desire to quit is #1 when you're building from the ground up.

You DGAF about making changes to a large codebase when you have no codebase...

[IshKebab]

Sure but at scale the downsides of Ruby become even more significant - performance is more of an issue at scale, as is the lack of static typing.

I don't think Typescript or Go have a worse developer experience or learning curve than Ruby. You can learn Go in a week. They both have better tooling and higher developer satisfaction (admired/desired) scores than Ruby according to Stackoverflow's survey.

[Axsuul]

That’s not a good indicator at all. Open source requirements are very different from business application.