Tiobe and Stack Overflow rankings don't mean much. Look how popular Tiobe ranks VB due to Excel macros, or SO ranks Bash and PowerShell very highly simply because people ask a lot of questions about it.
My own personal experience as a CTO and startup investor: I haven't seen Ruby (or even met someone whose primary language is Ruby) in a long time.
I think it had a moment ~10 years ago when a lot of people started companies using Rails. Some of them still use it, most of them just went out of business.
It hasn't been big since then. It seemed to only ever have become popular in a fairly limited bubble of startups, especially in Silicon Valley.
But some pretty successful startups used it and some successful companies today use it. It's been a tool used to spawn quite a few billion+ dollar companies.
Ruby is a fine language that some people have ridden to great success. It is still a fairly niche language.
We're on a popular website written in Arc -- likely the only website written in Arc. Popularity isn't everything and I'm not suggesting it is.
Ruby developers is small in % but rather large as an absolute number.
Smt88 is correct in that it is increasingly a niche. Churn rate is greater than retention rate. Junior Developers cant find jobs with Ruby and Rails, and they switch to others that do find them jobs. Companies only want to hire experience Ruby Rails developers but some of them moved on. It is a vicious cycle.
The point is even if Reddit was written in Arc, it has no bearing on Arc's industry status. It needs to be in a self sustainable ecosystem.
The fact it's used internally at Google and MS alone means it's got traction. I'm willing to bet lots of enterprise shops are using it for things, even if it's not #1.
Isn't the Stack Overflow one done by a survey, not just by analyzing the questions?
I really don't think Bash and Powershell are more popular for actual development than C++ and Go respectively. People just use them because they're there... Making the rankings a lot less meaningful.
I'd be willing to bet money that Bash is way, way more popular in development than Go.
If you mean popular as in "many people like using it", I would question your (and their) sanity.
According to Stack Overflow's survey[1], people enjoy Bash/Shell more than they enjoy Ruby.
I personally hate both Ruby and Bash, so I assume my sanity is beyond question.
1. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-loved-dr...
> in development
This can be taken a few ways. I don't use Go, but I interact with Bash. So you're right in a sense.
I'd also never write a web-app in bash, nor a non-trivial program, nor anything that isn't a shell script. So is it really meaningful when people are looking for a language to write a GUI app, web app, mobile app or game in?