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by DeathArrow 64 days ago
What happened to Ruby? It was very successful at some point.

Maybe kids started using JS exclusively. But what happened to older developers? Did they move over?

Rails seemed to enable very fast prototyping and iteration. Isn't it still the case?

I see PHP usage going down, but PHP doesn't seem to have any advantages over JS, .NET, Python or Go. While Ruby coupled with Rails promised easy and rapid development.

Of course, Ruby might not be best suited for large code bases or microservices but probably 90% of the Internet are small to medium web sites.
5 comments
bluerooibos 64 days ago
> Ruby might not be best suited for large code bases

Ruby/Rails powers some of the largest platforms on the planet - Shopify, GitHub, GitLab. Both have had something of a resurgence lately, too, with Ruby 4 and Rails 8 shipping recently, and people rediscovering that Rails is excellent for vibe coding.

I've been a Ruby developer for 10+ years and have never struggled to find work, and the communities feel very active and growing - so I'm honestly not sure what you mean by "what happened to Ruby". If you don't actively follow or participate in the community, I can imagine you wouldn't hear much about it day to day.

I don't pay attention to the JS world these days - what happened to JavaScript?

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swat535 63 days ago
Nothing has happened to Ruby, it's an excellent choice for software. We're basically at a point where majority of languages and stacks are on par with each other (unless you have niche requirements)
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pmontra 63 days ago
> But what happened to older developers? Did they move over?

I'm working on a project with a Rails backend and a Vue frontend.

I've been working on a JS backend and frontend project in the early 2010s but I think that it was the only project with a JS backend. There are plenty of projects with server generated HTML. In my case the backends were Ruby, Python, Elixir, Java, PHP.

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TiredOfLife 63 days ago
PHP + Laravel give the same easy and rapid development as Ruby + Rails. Plus PHP reads as a programming language. Ruby reads as it was written by somebody with heavy brain damage struggling to put words into sentences.
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faangguyindia 63 days ago
Ruby on Rails died because it was a resource Hog.

People moved to efficient IO requiring smaller servers.

If you make Ruby on Rails in a typed compiled language and show people how fast it is. People will switch in an eyeblink.

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