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Comment by CTmystery | Hacker News Reader

I'll bite on "just a fad in webdev circles", in case you are serious and not trolling. Railsworld is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rails this year. As I'm sure you know, Rails is built on Ruby. 20 years does not fit my definition of fad.

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I see what you mean, but I counter with Plone. It's been around for 24 years, and the annual Plone Conference is coming up in a couple months. Still, you don't see a whole lot of new Plone sites rolling out these days, and there's no Automattic-scale company with click-here-to-deploy convenience.

Nothing against Plone (although I was very happy to put its foundation layer, Zope, in my rear view mirror). It's a fine program that's very good at what it does. But just because something's been around a while doesn't mean that it's still vibrant and growing.

Plone never had anything even resembling Rails' popularity.

So true. Still, you can't judge that from how long it's been around.

That's why RoR was a fad and Plone isn't.

Check out the charts from Google Trends some time.

Just because there are people who still use it, doesn't make the statement that RoR was a fad less true. RoR was "the thing that everyone was using" at one point. It was that for several years. Anyone who's anyone was building stuff with Rails.

Now it's probably the third option, when building websites... and a fourth option, when building APIs.

fad - an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities; a craze.

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I don't think Ruby is a fad. The drop off Ruby had since early 2010s is dramatic, but it stabilized around 5% of all PRs on GH in the last few years:

https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/2

It's still one of the most popular languages for web development.

> It's still one of the most popular languages for web development.

But is it? Stats on major job boards such as Indeed show a steep decline in recent years. There are consistently twice as many Django/Flask roles listed compared with Rails. Node is the most popular but Spring, ASP.Net and PHP occupy the next level below Node.

Thanks for linking that graph. I wonder to what extent Ruby’s decline as a percentage is due to its use declining versus other languages growing.

>RoR was "the thing that everyone was using" at one point. It was that for several years. Anyone who's anyone was building stuff with Rails.

I extremely doubt that. Maybe in your geographical area with small stage startups.

At any given time Spring has probably seen 10x usage of RoR.

My point was more that Ruby exploded because of a period when Rails was growing super fast. I don't know what the growth in RoR space is but I'm certain it's nowhere near what it was in late 2000s/early 2010s. And outside of that there's really not much in Ruby space.

Python was all over the place when RoR came out, meanwhile I only remember hearing about Ruby on random forum posts or by some enthusiast before RoR.

I don't think moonchrome was disparaging Rails or minimizing its popularity, but, rather pointing out that Ruby is only as popular as it is because of webdev, because of Rails (and the Rails-likes that came after)—outside of that specific niche, it's not very commonly used just about anywhere else, especially when compared to Python.

Chef and puppet are fairly big ones though. Other than config management, I think this is true. Rails is king in ruby land.

Homebrew, the macOS dependency manager, and Cocoapods, the Swift and objective C package manager, are both written in Ruby.

Mh. Honestly, I've encountered ruby in about 3 primary ways. RoR and Sinatra, which are kinda the same webdev thing, and Chef as a config management. There are additional things, but more supporting things - Rake and Capistrano as deployment systems, Berkshelf and such as supporting things.

Outside of this, it's been perl and python, with python replacing perl after that whole perl 6 fiasco while the language and distros started understanding packaging python.

10 ish years ago, pretty much all new hip HN startups plus existing success stories all started in Ruby on Rails, or feels like they did anyway.

I think they meant back before either Ruby or Python hit their stride, not afterwards.

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