It’s established, so it is “boring” now and that is not necessarily a bad thing. I do get the feeling that Rails is becoming “more popular” again but not in the way you would expect. Some of the old Rails guys that moved on are getting nostalgic (me and one of my friends for example) and some guys that tried a few web frameworks are giving Rails a chance now that it isn’t the “hipster” tech it once used to be.

P.s.: Just take a look at how this article is exploding (also most of the other Rails articles on Hacker News lately). They don’t just explode in popularity and comments but every single one of them has given me ridiculous amounts of karma. I would say that is a heavy indicator of a Rails popularity bounce-back, vocal AND silent.

It’s around and popular, but it doesn’t have zealots to suck all the oxygen out of the conversation.

Look at the people in this comment section that are emotionally upset that the author didn’t prefer JS over ruby. They’re calling the author stupid, saying the author is bad at bootstrapping or just not using the right frameworks.

People don’t seem to be emotionally connected to Rails in the same way.

Another rails dev (10 years) it’s not the bright shiny new toy it used to be. But it’s still used by many, the jobs are plenty (I get tons of recruiter calls), and experience in it tends to pay very well.

As a Rails dev, based on the number of LI messages and emails I'm getting these days, I can tell you Rails is absolutely NOT a thing of the past.

The latter. Rails isn't cool but you see it used in so many places. I'm currently contracting with a UK Government dept and Rails is one of the two approved stacks, it's used on basically all externally facing projects.

No doubt it's very popular still - I see it used every day. Just most of the people using it are busy using it and it's not the new hotness that warrants constant new discussion.

Rails is in the same state as Java - it's still there, but people don't talk about it much.

It's still productive. It's just not "cool" anymore. Further, some of the choices DHH and company have made have been the opposite of other communities: for example, rails omakase still doesn't default to a single page app, though it is supported.

If I started a project today that was slated to be on the web, I'd pick one of two languages. If the least interesting part of the work was the code, and I didn't see significant places where I was worried about future performance in the business logic layer, I'd pick rails. (This is 95% of cases.) If I thought this system would have performance-critical components or would need to scale to thousands of programmers of varying skill, I'd pick java.

(I have a soft spot in my heart for clojure and elixir, and there are some edge cases where I might pick those, and a java ecosystem would allow for clojure interop. For example, some problems lend themselves to functional thinking. And, of course, there are some problems where another language shines - I could see defaulting to another tool if necessary.)

Rails dev for 10 years here, we're still around and the jobs are still plenty

It's just not trendy anymore. It's still used.

I use it all the time, I’m just not interested in magpie debates.