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Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

As someone who uses Lift (in addition to other frameworks) I'm a bit surprised by this decision. Lift is at the state where it is just getting the features and docs to be useful to a wider audience. Scala adoption is rising. It seems David Pollak is going for the corporate market and I don't think this is the right focus at this stage of Lift's development.

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Is Ruby making inroads in the corporate market?

I think so. Thoughtworks, who are a straight-up corporate consultancy, have done Ruby since 2006. Ruby is certainly further along the adoption curve than Scala, so perhaps DPP is trying to leapfrog over the adoption of Scala by adding JRuby support. However, IMO Scala is not what is holding Lift back -- it's lack of decent documentation. Just read the other comments on this post...

I've been doing Rails work at ThoughtWorks for more than three years now. Judging from the projects I've been on, Ruby has achieved a fair amount of penetration with the Fortune 500 crowd. Whether that's expanding, topped off, or contracting, I can't judge.

My personal impression, backed by no real data, is that Ruby adoption has tapered off somewhat. Python and PHP web frameworks have absorbed the innovations of Rails and the subjective advantages of Ruby as a language over either aren't enough to close the gap.

I wouldn't say that Ruby or Rails are dying but it also doesn't seem to me that they've achieved escape velocity either.

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