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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

I think ‘is Ruby dying?’ is little more than a meme that has stuck around for longer than it deserves.

The continuing work on the language and its performance is impressive, but Ruby (and Rails) themselves have the honour of being stable, tried-and-tested solutions for rapid application development. Is it as exciting as the latest and greatest serverless lambda framework in Typescript? Not really. Is it a dependable workhorse? Absolutely.

At some point you might be successful enough to justify a rewrite into something else, but a simple Rails app will take you a long way with little effort.

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I don't deny the utility of Rails for building a certain class of web site. But I think there is a difference between Rails and Ruby, and a difference between use of a technology and improvements to that technology.

I think a technology must continue to change and adapt to remain relevant. I see Shopify as the main driver of current improvements to Ruby (the core features of the most recent release, and the upcoming release, were mostly due to Shopify as I understand it). I don't see smaller companies doing these improvements and I think without them Ruby will (slowly, because it's used in some big places) fade away.

I'm a bit surprised that Github isn't doing work on Ruby, since they're probably the largest RoR deployment

A lot of ex-Hubbers went to Shopify. Additionally, a lot of upstream commits to Rails occurred from things pulled out of GitHub. GitHub has (had?) an entire team dedicated to Ruby and Rails and performance and optimizations/improvements

This surprised me, as I knew of several prominent GitHub folks contributing to Rails, but when I looked [1], they're all at Shopify. TIL!

[1] https://github.com/rails/rails/milestones/7.1.0

Smaller companies can be happy with Ruby as it is while enjoying the incremental improvements. They're hardly going to invest in hiring C-proficient engineers to bolster the language - it's simply good enough to start a business from and the performance metric is low priority.

They're in a different class to heavy hitters like Shopify and Github, who will gain a lot more from investing in gradual improvements to Ruby's runtime at the scale they operate at.

I'll contrast it with JavaScript, which has tried to assimilate every language pattern under the sun over the past decade and is intensely difficult to maintain a stable stack with, even if it's better now than it used to be.

I used to get invites for jobs and see listings for jobs for Ruby and Rails a lot. Now I don't see any at all. There's most definitely a "dead" feeling to the platform.

I hardly hear about new projects being started with Rails as well...

My co-founder and I are using RoR at our new company! It's definitely not dead and allows you to build SAAS very quickly.

It might just be the economy. I was getting about 20 inquiries a week from Rails positions until around December 2022.

It's used in many companies, new and legacy.

Yeah same story here. Until about 6-7 months ago I was hearing from recruiters for Rails jobs daily, both old and new projects.

I'd be very surprised if the decrease since then is out of line with the rest of the industry, regardless of tech stack.

Probably depends where you’re based. Ruby is still lucrative in London and there is a healthy market for it both in startups and more established businesses. While I’ve branches out to other languages (not just JS as a full stack engineer) my career is still boosted by my Ruby experience.

I don’t think this makes it dead or dying though. It’s stable and entrenched while JS has taken the place of the golden child.

One complaint I’ll grant myself is that library development is a little less prolific this days. Again, there are well-established solutions to a lot of problems in Ruby so you’ll have a go-to collection of gems, but it’s more often the case these days that something doesn’t have much library support and you’ve got to roll your own.

As a Rails person, I get a lot of those requests.

It may be that after years of working on other technologies, you just aren't passing the filters anymore. When we were aggressively hiring Rails devs in 2021, we specifically searched for the seasoned Rails devs that could hop in and get going. I've found less appetite outside of the big shops (Shopify/Github/etc) to pick up junior Rails devs which isn't great.

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