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Comment by JAlexoid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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