It's funny how we hear so much about Ruby's decline yet 3 of the highest-valued startups - Stripe, Shopify and AirBnB - are up there making fortunes with it whilst contributing to Ruby's vibrant ecosystem.
Perhaps it's that they don't believe in the future of Kotlin outside of mobile?
And yes, Sorbet is magical. They’ve taken good ideas from typesystems such as Typescript including the tooling for code completion, inference and refactoring.
Sorbet truly brought joy to my lift.
Although Ruby is way too dynamic for my liking. Many ways you can shoot yourself with it.
>But nearly all of Stripe’s codebase is implemented in Ruby running on the default Ruby VM (YARV). Not only did we not need Java VM-level interoperability, choosing either alternative Ruby implementation would have made for a difficult migration path.
https://sorbet.org/blog/2021/07/30/open-sourcing-sorbet-comp...
It would be interesting to see in a few years what the next successful unicorns are building with today.
Agreed that PHP was the #1 startup language in the Facebook era, then Ruby in the GitHub era, and I think TypeScript now. But while they’re all very productive “early days” languages, TS stays much more productive over time.
Go, Java and Python are all popular startup choices too, but I think TS is the top startup choice right now, and a great choice at that.
Performance is really not an issue unless you're doing very CPU-intensive work which you can't offload to a native library for some reason, or you need to scale vertically rather than horizontally (which is even rarer). Compute cost only really starts being a worthwhile optimization target at the "hundreds of billions of requests per day" level, and even then you're not gonna see much of an improvement from moving to Java unless you're actually very good at tuning threadpools (and it might still not be enough of a win compared to whatever else your developers could be doing with that time).
Great type system and language otherwise, though.
Exceptions are a special exception in Typescript because they can come from pretty much anywhere so it can't realistically know the type at compile time.
For everything else you are probably want discrimination unions.
1) 99.9%+ of the time, it'll be an instance of `Error` or some child class.
2) There's a recent compiler flag that's been added which defaults caught errors to `unknown` rather than `any`.
3) You still have access to the same tools to inspect unknown errors as you do everything else - `instanceof`, checking the presence/absence of properties, etc.
It's not great but it's something.
I would actually say the propensity of libraries to use exceptions as control flow and then _fail to document anything about those totally expected outcomes_ is a much bigger headache; that truly is an artifact of its JS inheritance.
None of this is changing the fact that Ruby has been on a sharp decline for a decade now and it's probably never coming back.
My personal interpretation: Ruby is extremely slow, dynamically typed, and RoR hasn't kept up with the web innovations of the past decade.
COBOL, PHP, and FORTRAN all lack modern ecosystems (package managers, etc) which hinder them significantly.
COBOL is dead for new development because it has horrible ergonomics compared to modern languages. There's a reason why companies will pay big bucks if you're willing to maintain old COBOL with nearly no qualifications.
PHP is still widely used, but it's also got some language quirks and was mainly aimed at backend work. Since most web dev tries to offload onto the user instead of the server now, it's disappearing for both reasons.
FORTRAN is still widely used in academic research and the modern language version (f90+) is actually pretty nice to work in imo. It's a decent competitor to C/C++ and the compilers are nuts for scaling which is why it sticks around for scientific work. It's practically free to move from single node to a full cluster workload using only compiler flags.
I think your PHP info is wrong, PHP has a package manager named composer. So if you need to connect to amazon S3 amazon published a package (that does't depend on 100 leftpads) https://packagist.org/packages/aws/aws-sdk-php
Maybe is not modern enoug in your opinion? Then what is missing except lefpad and color-red ?
Its unfortunate that PHP has been clubbed with COBOL :-).
You may not be aware but PHP has a great package manager called composer. It is intensively used in the PHP community for a long time now. The packages are available at https://packagist.org/ .
Packagist houses 300,000+ packages and has received 50 Billion package downloads since 2012 (See https://packagist.org/statistics ). PHP's Packagist would actually would easily rank amongst the biggest package management ecosystems among programming languages.
PHP is certainly not disappearing. While it is no longer as dominant as it used to be and there is a slow, long term decline, it continues to be very active. Ruby's decline actually is sharper than PHP. Here is an interesting resource https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/08/05/top-20-june-2021/ . All statistics need to be taken into perspective but if you look at other proxy activity like GitHub PRs, projects, jobs etc. for PHP, it continues to be very strong. Using the word "disappearing" feels wrong to me. Trends are not irreversible. Over the years, languages have gone down, only to come back up.
P.S. Fortran is still going strong also. It is still used extensively in the Scientific Computing community. While, I'm not familiar with the ecosystem there are package managers in Fortran too. I'm not familiar with how good or popular they are though.
Modern statically typed languages do everything that dynamic languages do and a lot more.