I just found out about The Odin Project, a self-paced online course to learn full stack web development. There are two paths: one is Ruby on Rails and the other is full JavaScript and nodejs. I am leaning more towards Ruby but I wanted to get some more opinions from folks in the field.
Ruby is used in some large, older existing projects (e.g. GitLab, Redmine, Puppet) but my impression is that a lot of them do not have very much active development of the Ruby parts going on any more.
I am seriously curious here: Why has popularity of Ruby declined?
Probably a few reasons for this. I’m not a ruby dev so take this with a grain of salt.
Ruby doesn’t have a lot to offer beyond languages like Python or Go without its companion web development framework Rails. Ruby on Rails was good for its time (~2012 -> 2015 era was peak), but there are more mature, stable, and widely adopted frameworks available in other languages. RoR touted speed to develop as a feature, but you can do things plenty fast with the aforementioned languages too. On the flip side, rails apps are notoriously slow to boot. I think this became a problem with cloud native infrastructure. For example, Kubernetes likes to spin up services very quickly, and can be painful to work with if that’s not an option (experienced this with Java apps too for that matter). As self hosting on bare metal went by the wayside, so too did interest in developing new apps on rails, imho.
Interesting! Thank you for the perspective. I am seeing a trend of smaller businesses that are bringing services back on premises and self-hosting but I have no interest in working for a small business. I’ve been there, done that, and it was hell.
Yeah, which makes Ruby one of those languages like COBOL, you can make a lot of money if you’re in that world, but I wouldn’t ever recommend that someone should try and join that world, it’s going to be too hard to get in to and it might not stick around for long. I know some people that make a lot of money working in Ruby, but that doesn’t mean that anyone can, unlike javascript which will be valuable anywhere