As a brand new Rails developer/web developer altogether, I'm an outsider looking. But it feels to me the chants of "Rails is doomed" mirror that of "PHP is doomed". Yet as you state (and show in your links) PHP is still very healthy and nowhere near death. Sure it might not be the hottest thing on the block, but really JS won't remain the hottest thing on the block in 20 years either, but JS won't die. Neither will Rails. Rails might not the new scorching hotness that it was in 2006, but it's still plenty hot. Rails has quite a bit of life left in it.

I'm on board with this kind of thinking.

Despite languages and the FLOSS projects around them being passions and/or hobbies for so many professionals, at the end of the day I kind of need to get paid for knowledge and opinion. This also sort of requires that individuals and organizations who employe people for their opinion/expertise give two shits about, for example, Elixir.

As long as there are (tens of?) thousands of new job postings for Rails every month I think that indicates devs who prefer Ruby aren't "biting asses", and that companies aren't passing over Ruby/Rails.

>> That's what everyone predicted half a decade ago, yet it hasn't happened, not even the PHP death part.

Indeed. I don't think it will happen...at least not the way people are predicting it to happen. There are plenty of dev jobs that ultimately, you can pick any of the mentioned technologies and if it makes you happy, you'll find a job that will allow you to apply that skill while paying you a great salary (or hourly fee).

These debates are good fun for sure, but ultimately, it doesn't matter in most cases.