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Comment by stuart_real | Hacker News Reader

As per GitHub's popularity chart, Ruby was the #5 language in 2014, and #10 in 2022 - https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages

Starting a new commercial project/company in 2024 in Ruby is questionable.

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Correction: you mean 2014, not 2024.

Do you think there is no criteria worth considering besides the size of the hiring pool? What if 2 hiring pools are sufficiently big, do you still pick the bigger one every time?

Thanks. Corrected.

> Do you think there is no criteria worth considering besides the size of the hiring pool? What if 2 hiring pool are sufficiently big, do you still pick the bigger one every time?

It is not just a hiring pool. Look at various third-party SASS tools, they see Ruby as a second-grade language to support.

That's not at all my experience. There's a one-line integration between almost everything under the sun and Rails (business/traffic analytics, performance/profilers, error notifications, logging, object storage integration, I could probably go on). Many other frameworks don't even have the general capability of doing one-line integrations.

I think a fair concern is lack of SDKs for cloud based services you will need to / will be forced to use.

I responded to another thread under this comment, but can you give me some examples?

Azure SDK.

one could also argue that making tech decisions based on popularity charts is questionable

One could argue that making tech decisions while completely ignoring popularity charts is more questionable.

You're right. Those shouldn't be completely ignored. They probably shouldn't be the only argument to make tech decisions upon. Did you ever build any webapp in Ruby on Rails? You should check it out!

Rising from #10 to #5 seems to imply that a lot of people are making 'questionable' decisions. As an active senior RoR dev since like 2014ish seeing that makes my heart atwitter :)

I corrected the mistake. It went from #10 to #5. Only language with such secular decline.

Pardon my sarcasm: You should work on WordPress. It's the most popular website framework in the world.

Yeah, it is. But is it growing or shrinking in the market share, that's the real question.

Rails 8 can make you a one-person framework and a successful SaaS solo-owner. Don't really care about the declining market share imo, I love and embrace it despite its shortcomings.

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