Hacker News Reader

Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

"Ruby is by no means inferior to PHP, and you will get paid more per hour to program in Ruby."

Any decision you make to learn anything based on payback has to factor in what will happen if more people choose to learn something. If more people learn Ruby because it pays better (let's assume that is correct) then supply and demand could equalize and the pay will go down. Right now if pay is high for Ruby it means most likely there is a supply and demand in balance. When that changes so will the pay. The only time I haven't seen this happen is with the rates lawyers charge. And the reason for that has to do more with personal relationships and quality of work.

View on HN

Right right right. I would add this: Ruby could well be considered "passé" someday (history tells us it necessarily will be), and the Rubyists of the future would really bristle at the suggestion that what they're doing is worth less simply because the market says it is.

The Rails MVC architecture is already past its prime, since it solves the problems of 2004. It's possible that startups may move more toward backend-as-a-service + JavaScript front-end instead of using Rails as their MVP.

In any event, the transition should be slow and I fully expect Ruby to be around for a long time, but people may notice a slow decline in demand for Rails programmers in the next few years compared to other hotter technologies. Sinatra (or some other Ruby framework) may replace Rails as a backend.

I'm a Rails programmer and I don't bristle at the suggestion that market demand changes. I welcome the change and adapt. I don't mind learning new languages.

I think that Sinatra will become increasingly popular within the Ruby community (and financial help from Heroku/Salesforce can't hurt!), but I also think it's interesting that the micro-frameworks inspired by Sinatra (Flask for Python, Express for Node, plus many others), will become the fall-back for more advanced developers because they do a lot less specification and leave a lot more space to the developer.

So I say don't give up on Ruby. And if you insist on Rails-style MVC, there's always Padrino for Sinatra, Tower for Node, etc.

So much going on, so little time...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com