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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Is position #10 in https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages bad?

It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.

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It has dropped in popularity and has never regained the popularity it once held.

Of the many developers who used to write Ruby (myself included), I would wager not many of those same people still do.

It's dropped in relative popularity, but the demand feels like it's still increasing to me (been doing Ruby professionally since 2006), just not as fast as some of the other languages.

Keep in mind the number of developers overall is rising rapidly still.

Compare that to Rust. For all the hype it has, very few companies are shipping products with it. There are a few, but nowhere near as many as are using Ruby.

I get your point but it's a case of right tool for the job. Every copy of Ruby now includes YJIT written in Rust because Rust is the right tool for that task.

It's easy to forget though that number of lines of code required to do something is also a valid metric and Ruby beats Rust on that.

So if you're shipping CRUD web apps that might be a more important metric than say memory usage or CPU time.

Different job, different tool. More people want to ship web apps than write their own JITs.

Engineering is the art of trade offs.

Yeah but look at the trajectories - Rust is one of the fastest growing languages and Ruby is one of the fastest declining languages.

That's probably true, but also a poor measure of success. I bet there are more companies using Ruby than there are companies using C++, too. They fill different niches, and different types of companies deliver very different products using those languages.

The ratio of people who can code in Python or Ruby to people who can code in Rust or C++ is very high.

I don’t know why “number of companies using language X” is a metric that is used here. Wordpress is serving 43% of websites on the internet as of 2025, so we should all be learning PHP!

You are probably writing this in a browser with Rust code in it.

That's very nice, but not in itself a good argument for language use. If you count using a system written in a language, then almost every programmer uses Ruby daily as both Github and Gitlab are written in Ruby. Similarly you probably interact quite frequently with (banking) systems written in COBOL, but nobody would call COBOL a popular language.

Safari has Rust?

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