| I enjoy the Indeed.com job trends for this sort of thing: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n... I'm a Ruby/Rails developer (and I run MemphisRuby) and while I seriously enjoy working with Rails I don't expect it to be as popular ten years from now. Rails is still tremendously good at what it does and I don't think it's likely that another framework or language is going to beat it at its own game. The real question is whether or not the things that Rails does best will continue to be important in the marketplace. We've already seen parts of Rails's core competencies carved out by other tools: Erlang/Node/Go enable saner async programming. Backbone/Angular/Ember enable rich web applications. Scala/Clojure/Go/etc. on the "fast compiled backend services" front. Even PHP is keeping pace with the times (Composer, Laravel) just enough to keep its adherents from having a real reason to jump ship. Ruby and Rails are still pretty much as good as it gets for rapid development of web applications (the backend parts of MVC, anyway), and there's a growing Ruby niche for configuration management (Chef, Puppet, etc). Personally I find my investment in learning and working with Ruby has been a great way for me to experience a much wider variety of technologies and architectures than I would have otherwise. Thanks to Rails work I've learned tons about AMQP, Postgres, Chef, Backbone, JavaScript, CSS, Ansible, DNS (bind), and more that I just wouldn't have had the same exposure to in a slower-paced development environment. Your ending line about "still in wide use but not frequently selected for the best new projects" is a bit complicated. Certainly any language stays in wide use once it falls out of fashion and its projects categorically move to the "legacy" phase, but "best new projects" is a bit much. A lot of what we might think of as the 'best' projects are driven by fashion just as much as technical merits. |
But the question how much demand will there be for that style of app in the future?
In a similar manner, I was asked the other day if I still did any Delphi development - for the first time in about eight years. Delphi was a best-of-class tool in its day, but there just isn't the same demand for database-driven desktop Windows apps any more.