Ask HN: Why Did Ruby Fall Out of Favour with Startups | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why Did Ruby Fall Out of Favour with Startups

6 pointssarimkx5 comments

I have always heard that Ruby is a great prototyping language, which is why many startups used it.

Companies like Github, Shopify, and others are built on it.

- What are the factors that led to Ruby's decline?

- Specifically, why do we see fewer startups building on Ruby?

- Will we see Ruby bounce back?

My personal controversial theory: lack of first class support for Windows. This was a big reason why Python had a renaissance amongst learners, academia, data journalists, and a lot of more "casual" developers that Ruby is perfectly suited for. Python has pretty much eaten up the "not a webapp" market Ruby could have easily had and JavaScript rapidly began eating up the webapp market from the other side, leaving Ruby with quite few unique selling points (though I still love it myself, I'm speaking in broad ecosystem terms).

I think Ruby itself has lost its trend, but people who use it keep using it. We are in a time where people prefer compiled, statically typed languages which contributes to Ruby losing its popularity, that's why alternatives like Crystal is growing.

Another reason is Ruby is tightly coupled with the Rails framework, Ruby should really try to separate itself from it and shine on its own.

There is nothing Ruby offers that other languages lacks on, I find it exceptionally well for prototyping and for gluing togheter different things through the CLI etc, and I will continue using Ruby for that.

I believe Ruby will bounce back in the future, we are currently seeing lots of cool new features being introduces after Ruby 3 like YJIT & Ractors!

Personnally, I didn't commit because the gem ecosystem was hit or miss, and the culture was about getting things pretty instead of robust (e.g: nice docs but monkey patching everywhere).

Plus on the long run, parskng ruby is difficult for my brain because of optional parenthesis.

Enventuly I sticked to python. I know people critize python packaging a lot, but it was the least of evils in 2010, much better than the competition.

Static type system!

It's the only reason Ruby (and Rails community) declined.

Longer answer: To work effectively with Ruby (and RoR), you need a dedicated team to maintain the test suite, because it's the ONLY way to go forward.

In case you're a small startup, it's a NO.

This, the Ruby team introduced RBS (.rbs file extension) which allows you add static types but I find it cumbersome to having keep track of two of the same files.

If they only allowed static types in the same source code! (I know Sorbet exists, but I haven't really used it yet)

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