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Comment by py_or_dy | Hacker News Reader

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py_or_dy·

Ruby is just as dead. Only thing it had going for it was Rails.

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In Startup Land Rails is still thriving. Check out jobs on Angel.co and HN Who's Hiring.

I think you mean in San Francisco Startup Land...the other startup lands are less wedded to Ruby these days

London stats actually ;).

Is there even a good alternative to Rails?

As far as I know, it's still the best option there is for quickly building a MVP on the web if one isn't building a SPA.

Is Rails quicker and easier than, say, Django? Sure. Is it quicker and easier by enough to make it worth having another language in your stack? Not really, IME.

Laravel[1] is pretty close, and PHP has some big advantages over Ruby for performance and deployment.

If you had told me 5 years ago that I'd be recommending PHP as an alternative vs. RoR I wouldn't have believed you, but the PHP world has improved in ways that I wouldn't have thought possible.

[1] https://laravel.com/

Laravel may be based on the idea of Rails but in terms of programmer happiness it doesn't come close. A typical file of idiomatic PHP code reads like stodgy old Java and contains about 60% blank lines and doc comments as recommended by PSRs. Rails, by contrast, is elegantly concise and has fantastic metaprogramming.

Ruby is doing well as a configuration format. Look at Vagrant and Homewbrew, for example.

Also, there is Crystal, for compiling something very similar to Ruby, to native.

And that Ruby syntax slapped on Erlang

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