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Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

I dunno- I just got back from rubyconf where I both gave and watched talks on metaprogramming with no web focus at all. There was a great illustrated talk featuring lemurs that was just a walkthrough of rebuilding various enumerable methods with reduce. Other ones that I went to:

- a "how ruby's GC works" talk

- A deep dive into how a core dev found + fixed memory usage in ruby

- The unexpected pitfalls of sublassing certain std lib classes

- A new desktop graphics library

- Using ruby to operate an automatic wafflemaker

And these are just the ones I attended. I imagine railsconf is more web focused, but rubyconf doesn't seem like that at all.

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A couple members of my team attended and we made a friendly wager before they attended: how many conference attendees would be primarily Rails developers?

We guessed respectively 25%, 50%, 75% (my guess).

Based on some very, very, very fuzzy sampling, they estimated it was somewhere around 50%.

Any guess yourself? Are you a Rails dev?

Ruby is used in a lot of places where Rails isn't, by a few large companies. The one that comes to mind is Stripe, which has at least a couple hundred engineers writing Ruby code that has nothing to do with web development (much less Rails).

While Rails certainly did a huge amount to make the language popular, there's lots of things Ruby is good at aside from concatenating snippets of HTML.

Actually, that being said, while maybe 90% of personal Ruby projects don't use Rails, a good half use ActiveRecord in some capacity. I wonder how much that makes it a Rails project, by some reasonable definition.

>Ruby is used in a lot of places where Rails isn't, by a few large companies.

And indirectly by many more who use chef

And many people use Homebrew on OSX, or Linuxbrew (homebrew for Linux -- useful especially for users of beowulf clusters who often don't have rights to install anything except in their home directories), and brew and its formulas are written in Ruby.

I'm surprised it's so low, actually. I'd have guessed 75% as well. And yes, I am a web developer, spending about half my time in rails and the other half split between JS and misc ops stuff.

Thankfully rubyconf explicitly says that it's not the place for rails-focused talks, which results in a lot of great discussion on other aspects + usages of the language. :)

Offtopic: The waffle talk is listed at https://rubyconf.org/program#session-697 and it may have been recorded. These are my favourite kinds of talks at conferences.

Iirc all the talks were recorded by confreaks. They said they'll be up within a month of the conference. That _was_ an excellent talk - the presenter was very engaging. :)

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