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by starrhorne
4629 days ago
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There are 20-30 ruby conferences every year in the US alone. I've been to about 7. They all had > 200 attendees. Even the less-known ones tend to sell out well in advance. Freelance rates for ruby developers are crazy-high. In Seattle, at least, I'm seeing $200/hr as not uncommon. And on a side note, PHP has been around for about 80 years now and it's still moving along. So I don't think ruby/rails are going to "die" any time soon. |
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I live in Israel, where Ruby has taken a while to make inroads. But we just had a conference last week, and the many attendees were super excited about the language. And companies were desperate to find employees who know Ruby and/or Rails.
Indeed, the biggest reason that I've found companies give for avoiding the use of Ruby is the scarcity of experienced developers. A client of mine switched from Ruby to PHP last year, simply because he could easily find PHP programmers, and they cost a lot less. You could argue that this points to companies leaving Ruby, but in many ways, I'd say that it rather indicates Ruby is a victim of its own success.
Even if Ruby is dying (which I don't think is the case), plenty of seemingly dead languages are still in demand, and are used on all sorts of projects. You can command great consulting rates in COBOL, today, if you want.
Both Ruby and Rails have strong, active communities that are pushing the language and framework forward in all sorts of interesting ways. The key to a successful open-source project is the community, so I'm pretty confident that I'll be working in Ruby for at least a few more years. But hey, if the author wants to work in something else, power to him; we're fortunate to be living in an era of many high-quality, open-source languages.