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by adamnemecek 19 days ago
Is Ruby really where it's at right now?
3 comments

It pairs quite nicely with agentic development as it has a history of plenty of open-source projects published on GitHub, which means they have learned to work with Rails et al. rather well.

It also helps to have a "boring" framework with strong opinions and strong community standards etc.

I wouldn't claim it to be the best as I'm not sure how you'd measure that, but I can say that in my experience it is letting me build things to a decent standard really rather quickly.

If you're building something new today, I'd generally recommend starting with a framework that you already know. But for those of us who already know Rails, it continues to be a wonderful choice. I'm playing with Phoenix LiveView for some projects, which is letting me build real-time UI's really easily – but they have some real-time requirements which Rails can do but is not it's strength. For anything a little more CRUD, it's a no-brainer.

For languages, I'd say Gleam and OxCaml are going to become more and more popular on here. Not sure what else.

In the industry, Ruby often (but not always) pairs with Rails. Ruby+Rails exists in a sweet spot of making most of the mundane bullshit of writing software vanish, you spend 80% of your time thinking about your business problem, and that was before LLMs. With LLMs, you can get a lot done.

It wouldn't surprise me if AI economics act as a forcing function for more Ruby adoption.

What do you mean? It’s been around for a while and people still use it yes