Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

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The author cites a graph of declining Google searches for "Ruby on Rails" relative to "Node.js" and then follows up with the statement:

You can see how rails is losing mindshare to newer frameworks.

I don't really think this proves anything. People who are already familiar with something aren't going to perform a vanilla Google search for it. For example, if I'm looking for a car, I'm not likely to perform a search for "automobile" but after overhearing somebody mention something called a Model S I might search for that.

A quick anecdote- I first learned about RoR circa 2008 from a colleague and performed a Google search for "Ruby on Rails" to find out what he was talking about. Fast forward three years and I was writing several web applications in it and don't recall ever performing that search again.

A far better metric I believe would be to perform an analysis of Stack Overflow questions by language and see whether it coincides with the chart the author cites.

Just devils advocate here but I highly doubt you never performed a search for rails again. I am very proficient in NodeJS, but I'm searching daily with the term for helping fix a bug I have. I am having an issue with es6 classes, I don't search "classes" or "programming classes" I search "es6 classes node.js" Boom, Node.JS now has a search term in trends.

When developing Rails applications, I rarely, if ever, include 'Rails' in my search terms, but rather drill down to the applicable component library: ActiveRecord, ActionController, Haml, Rack, etc.

This is a good idea, because it also avoids all those transportation or mining related results you often get with general "rails" or "ruby" searches.

I'm not entirely joking. I do the same thing you do (using ActiveRecord), but the way I got there was 1) searching "rails", 2) throwing in a term like ActiveRecord to avoid unrelated results, and final 3) realizing that "rails" was no longer necessary for the search.

Yup. I also find that the Rails documentation is good enough that I can usually find what I need in the Rails guides and API docs- or failing that, the source code.

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