Ruby is dying -- and the graph to prove it. | Hacker News Reader

Ruby is dying -- and the graph to prove it.

ohloh.net

6 pointsillumen12 comments

That's quite a sensationalist headline, don't you think?

Heh, fallacy with that chart is that it's tracking only MRI. There are many Ruby implementations in various stages of progress.

Fallacy B is pretending that the rate at which the interpreter is patched is some sort of measure of a language's quality, or of its community's health. As if the goal of a language designer wasn't to reach the point where the core was stable. As if running the risk of breaking existing code was a good thing.

This is pretty ridiculous - it's counting just one website, using "number of submits" as the metric, and when they say "dying" they mean "at the same level as 2007".

Interesting... I wonder if there's a bias here? I know that Ohloh is not very popular in the Ruby community. What would you get if you used Github instead?

Ruby is a tool that you use to build things. This is like saying that saws are dying because less wood was cut over the last few months.

Not quite.

It's like saying, saws are dying because more people are using motorised robot cutting machines now.

Relative to all commits tracked by whatever random website this is. Click "values" to see a slightly different story.

I think the values graph has a bug at the end point... It looks like it is displaying half a month or something -- for every language. For values it still shows a drop for ruby, apart from the bug at the end.

ohloh is a website which tracks lots of open source projects. 266,149 projects was the count at the time of writing.

Empirically, the Ruby is far from death. There is an active community, more publications than before, and an array of frameworks (Sinatra, Rhodes, RoR) to choose from. Saying Ruby is dying is like looking at a single tree in the forest, noticing it's diseased, and claiming the entire forest will fall to that disease.

Also, it's being forked for individual reasons, like Ruby Enterprise, thanks to sites like github.

There's less people writing ruby code. Both in the interpreter itself, and for open source projects using ruby. You can see on that page a graph showing less people are writing ruby code too.

Also, you see a vastly different picture if you click the "values" link rather than the "percent" link. Not sure why.

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