I'm a a typescript/java engineer. I would say my lifetime code stats are probably around 40% JS / 35% Typescript / 15% Java / 8% Python / 2% other. That is to say, I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language.
I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so small and uncommon today compared to others.
I am an active member of the ruby community so am definitely biased, but I'd love to know. Sorry if that's combative, but I always wonder how folks choose languages based on popularity. If there's anything folks can point at, or if it is more of a gut feel. (Unless it is javascript or C, which are always going to be around because of their huge deployed base.)
Edit: added place in the redmonk ratings. Changed to be less combative.
I've been doing Ruby development for about 12 years now.
I can honestly say I've had more job offers this last year that ever before and the money is honestly pretty great. With the release of Ruby3, Rails7, and many people having JS fatigue it seems like the ruby community has had quite a bit of growth within the last year or two. (not HUGE growth like 10 years ago, but enough that it's still pretty noticeable throughout the community)
Give it a go. Ruby (and Rails) aren't going anywhere. There are far too many companies that are perfectly happy and successful with rails-based apps.
Name a tech unicorn from the last 15 years, they probably have some ruby/rails code that is foundational to the company. Many have adopted microservices and newer languages like Go, but the core Ruby codebases aren't going away any time soon.
Even outside of the rails ecosystem, ruby is a wonderful scripting language for writing small tools with. I prefer it to Python when I need something more powerful than bash/sh.
I understand job security and demand is important.
But for me the most important has always been to enjoy myself as much as possible. That's also how I can do my best every day.
If that means having a 10% lower salary or half the number of job postings I'm fine with it.
If I really needed to find a non Ruby job I'm sure I still could, there's enough demand in general.
When I was contracting full time, a _very_ large portion of my time was paid for in Rails work. Something like 90%. I market myself as a true generalist, basically a CTO-for-hire, and still the contracts I landed almost always involved Rails in some way.
Unlike other languages, ruby is mainly driven by one application - Rails. As newer web FWs come, it's hard to see Rails keep up. The trends for Rails does not look good for the past 5 years [1]. I am hopeful that natalie [2] will work. If it does, it will remove the biggest downside to ruby.
I'll be honest, I'm worried too. I'm a fullstack dev, but I consider myself a decent rubyist. I've been writing it for about 10 years and have spoken at rubyconf a few times. All else being equal, I just like the language itself.
The points others make here are true, there are a ton of ruby shops, and demand for someone with a couple years of rails experience is still quite high.
But the issue is not where ruby is now, but where we see it in the long term. My predicted timeline is something like:
1. Right now, plenty of companies are still being founded on rails. The demand for ruby devs well outstrips the supply. I don't think it's the clear favorite anymore, though, even among trendy SF startups.
2. 5 years from now, far fewer companies will be being founded on ruby. It'll be rare, and mostly just when the founder happens to be a seasoned rubyist.
3. 10 years from now, the supply of rails devs will continue to trend upward, but the demand will have been trending downward for a few years and the good jobs will start to be harder to come by (relative to other tool chains)
4. 15 years from now, Ruby will still be going strong at large companies, but few or no early-stage startups will be using it. It will be seen as stagnant and enterprisy.
5. 20-30 years from now, Ruby will be kind of archaic. The demand for seasoned devs will still be there, but it'll be specialized roles to manage a legacy codebases that drives a lot of revenue and isn't worth replacing in a modern language. There will be few jobs, but also few senior rubyists so the jobs will pay well.
So, honestly, you could pick up ruby today and make a whole career out of it. If you're 25 years old, it might be getting a little tough as you approach retirement, but otherwise you'd be fine.
That said, a lot of people don't really want to work in a language that occupies stage 5. I know I don't want to be limited to only working on ancient codebases. And so I, like a lot of people, am hesitant to go all-in on ruby right now. It seems like it's a little too far down the hype curve to base the next 25 or so years of my career on.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible I'm wrong here. One thesis is that JS fatigue will drive a new wave of developers to Rails. Rails has been betting on that with a bunch of features that, theoretically, allow you to skip a lot of what you'd otherwise need JS for.
Personally, I'm unconvinced. I think the future lies in JS-native tech. Specifically Typescript and an all-in-one Rails-like tool like RedwoodJS or something similar. But then, few of us can really guess how these trends will turn out over the course of long decades. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I've barely ever written any Ruby outside of the occasional little script. And yet it's secretly my favorite language.
I'm in a similar boat, with the caveat that on linux, I use ruby as my main scripting language rather than bash, mostly because I find bash to to be a terrible language for anything remotely complex. Ruby has great integration for running shell commands, while also allowing you to write your scripts as an actual program, which is great.
For me, the language I have written almost nothing in, while it is secretly my favorite, is Elixir/Erlang.
10-year Rails dev here, there's still plenty of work to be found if you want it. (Full disclosure- I am currently not employed and working on a project not involving SWE.)
Last year Ruby Together, which primarily supported Ruby packages & infrastructure, merged into Ruby Central, which runs the main Ruby & Rails conferences as well as key Ruby infrastructure (Rubygems)
Last week I compared RubyOnRails (RoR) and Python Django.
For rapid prototyping, I think RoR has still something to say.
I like Django but I see little use (correct me, if I am wrong) from big Startups.
I was able to setup a tiny custom status page with RoR picking a module found on the web, and starting customizing the app for my own goals.
AngularJS and React are the king on the frontend in this years, so the Django/RoR approach seems a bit "old"; nerveless on RoR guides you find a way to use RoR only as an "API" Layer, so integrating it with an Angular frontend, for instance.
And with K8s and microservices, scaling is not a big issue if you code a share-nothing stack.
My take is that Django is stronger for websites: leaning slighly more towards a selfbuilt CMS. Whereas Rails is stronger for webapps. With a large overlap, and only slightly so.
But that both lack severely for complex business flows, -logic and integrations. Both are strong for CRUD cases, with accidental workflows attached to those operations. But that both lack tooling, and have the wrong architecture, to support complex, intermingled, businesslogic over time.
I personally see a lot more for Django than Rails, but then again I know Django and don't know Rails (been meaning to learn it for a long time) so that could be biasing me
I'm making a large pull request on rubygems.org (adding Webauthn) and the people are very helpful and friendly. I would encourage everybody to contribute, rubygems.org is just a regular rails app.
I think a major holdback for Ruby, is how tightly it is coupled to Rails.
Comments like this show how the community, unconscious, ties them together too.
I think for Ruby to truly thrive again, it must become more than 'the language rails was once written in'.
I'm a Ruby developer. I don't particularly like Rails (but don't hate or avoid it either) and I'm more and more convinced that Rails is doing Ruby more harm than good in the long run.
Ruby is so wonderful. For me and the type of software I write it makes developing a lot less miserable. I think there will be a serious renaissance of Ruby in the coming years as people get fatigued with the constant churn of languages and frameworks.
Pretty sure "start sharing the opening keynote stage with other contributors" doesn't mean "DHH cannot contribute any keynote at RailsConf" and he's blowing it out of proportion for drama's sake because he doesn't have a filter. (Not that that's historically been a problem, he's always been very outspoken and non-PC.)
[+] [-] aerovistae|4 years ago|reply
I wish I wasn't afraid that demand for it would vanish over time, which makes me reluctant to invest skills in its ecosystem. It seems so small and uncommon today compared to others.
[+] [-] mooreds|4 years ago|reply
* top companies using it? (shopify, github, stripe)
* number of stars on github for projects? https://github.com/rails/rails has 50k stars
* place in the Redmonk language rankings? https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-2... shows it at #9
* ability to get a good paying job? https://marketing.dice.com/pdf/2020/Dice_2020_Tech_Salary_Re... has the ruby salary at 114k, more than typescript/javascript
I am an active member of the ruby community so am definitely biased, but I'd love to know. Sorry if that's combative, but I always wonder how folks choose languages based on popularity. If there's anything folks can point at, or if it is more of a gut feel. (Unless it is javascript or C, which are always going to be around because of their huge deployed base.)
Edit: added place in the redmonk ratings. Changed to be less combative.
[+] [-] tarellel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcchambers|4 years ago|reply
Name a tech unicorn from the last 15 years, they probably have some ruby/rails code that is foundational to the company. Many have adopted microservices and newer languages like Go, but the core Ruby codebases aren't going away any time soon.
Even outside of the rails ecosystem, ruby is a wonderful scripting language for writing small tools with. I prefer it to Python when I need something more powerful than bash/sh.
[+] [-] axelthegerman|4 years ago|reply
But for me the most important has always been to enjoy myself as much as possible. That's also how I can do my best every day. If that means having a 10% lower salary or half the number of job postings I'm fine with it.
If I really needed to find a non Ruby job I'm sure I still could, there's enough demand in general.
[+] [-] JamesSwift|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lyime|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnathsf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzythinker|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
[2] https://github.com/natalie-lang/natalie
[+] [-] fishtoaster|4 years ago|reply
The points others make here are true, there are a ton of ruby shops, and demand for someone with a couple years of rails experience is still quite high.
But the issue is not where ruby is now, but where we see it in the long term. My predicted timeline is something like:
1. Right now, plenty of companies are still being founded on rails. The demand for ruby devs well outstrips the supply. I don't think it's the clear favorite anymore, though, even among trendy SF startups. 2. 5 years from now, far fewer companies will be being founded on ruby. It'll be rare, and mostly just when the founder happens to be a seasoned rubyist. 3. 10 years from now, the supply of rails devs will continue to trend upward, but the demand will have been trending downward for a few years and the good jobs will start to be harder to come by (relative to other tool chains) 4. 15 years from now, Ruby will still be going strong at large companies, but few or no early-stage startups will be using it. It will be seen as stagnant and enterprisy. 5. 20-30 years from now, Ruby will be kind of archaic. The demand for seasoned devs will still be there, but it'll be specialized roles to manage a legacy codebases that drives a lot of revenue and isn't worth replacing in a modern language. There will be few jobs, but also few senior rubyists so the jobs will pay well.
So, honestly, you could pick up ruby today and make a whole career out of it. If you're 25 years old, it might be getting a little tough as you approach retirement, but otherwise you'd be fine.
That said, a lot of people don't really want to work in a language that occupies stage 5. I know I don't want to be limited to only working on ancient codebases. And so I, like a lot of people, am hesitant to go all-in on ruby right now. It seems like it's a little too far down the hype curve to base the next 25 or so years of my career on.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible I'm wrong here. One thesis is that JS fatigue will drive a new wave of developers to Rails. Rails has been betting on that with a bunch of features that, theoretically, allow you to skip a lot of what you'd otherwise need JS for.
Personally, I'm unconvinced. I think the future lies in JS-native tech. Specifically Typescript and an all-in-one Rails-like tool like RedwoodJS or something similar. But then, few of us can really guess how these trends will turn out over the course of long decades. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[+] [-] l30n4da5|4 years ago|reply
I'm in a similar boat, with the caveat that on linux, I use ruby as my main scripting language rather than bash, mostly because I find bash to to be a terrible language for anything remotely complex. Ruby has great integration for running shell commands, while also allowing you to write your scripts as an actual program, which is great.
For me, the language I have written almost nothing in, while it is secretly my favorite, is Elixir/Erlang.
[+] [-] tomc1985|4 years ago|reply
Come on in the water's fine.
[+] [-] dghlsakjg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thejosh|4 years ago|reply
You can still find work in pretty much any language. Think COBOL is a dead language? :)
[+] [-] heshiebee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookrn|4 years ago|reply
https://rubytogether.org/news/2021-10-21-ruby-together-and-r...
http://rubycentral.org/
[+] [-] mooreds|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daitangio|4 years ago|reply
For rapid prototyping, I think RoR has still something to say.
I like Django but I see little use (correct me, if I am wrong) from big Startups.
I was able to setup a tiny custom status page with RoR picking a module found on the web, and starting customizing the app for my own goals.
AngularJS and React are the king on the frontend in this years, so the Django/RoR approach seems a bit "old"; nerveless on RoR guides you find a way to use RoR only as an "API" Layer, so integrating it with an Angular frontend, for instance.
And with K8s and microservices, scaling is not a big issue if you code a share-nothing stack.
[+] [-] berkes|4 years ago|reply
But that both lack severely for complex business flows, -logic and integrations. Both are strong for CRUD cases, with accidental workflows attached to those operations. But that both lack tooling, and have the wrong architecture, to support complex, intermingled, businesslogic over time.
[+] [-] bodge5000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorianmariefr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianthedev|4 years ago|reply
I'd love if Rails' ecosystem becomes more vibrant like Laravels'
[+] [-] berkes|4 years ago|reply
Comments like this show how the community, unconscious, ties them together too.
I think for Ruby to truly thrive again, it must become more than 'the language rails was once written in'.
I'm a Ruby developer. I don't particularly like Rails (but don't hate or avoid it either) and I'm more and more convinced that Rails is doing Ruby more harm than good in the long run.
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28954525
Was there something new here on the main page that needed posting?
[+] [-] mberning|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pabs3|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources#grants
[+] [-] mrtweetyhack|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hit8run|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamie_ca|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepyhead|4 years ago|reply