Is Ruby Dying?

http://jmoses.co/2013/12/21/is-ruby-dying.html

by jonaldomo • 13 years ago

91 152 13 years ago

lowglow• 13 years ago

no.

mattkrea• 13 years ago

lol. Agreed. I'm not a fan and sometimes wish it would but enough people are using it successfully to make it pretty evident that it is not going anywhere anytime soon.

polysics2• 13 years ago

Is it that day of the week again?

I would like to also point out the title of the post is misleading, as the findings are exactly the opposite.

nathos• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

sjtgraham2• 13 years ago

Citing this is such a knackered HN cliché it should mean an instant hell-banning.

jerf5• 13 years ago

You just may not be used to Ruby not having the exciting fire of initial hype. That is dead. But that's good. Languages can't live like that forever. Sooner or later they need to stop the wild experimenting, find some best practices and things that work, and settle down and ram home the things that work.

Ruby has entered final maturity. It will be in that phase until such time as it really does die, which could well be 10-15 years. Or more, though, honestly, I doubt that in 2028 we'll be considering Ruby anything more than legacy code... that's not because of Ruby itself, but rather the language category it is in. I expect we'll be looking at Python and Perl the same way.

Oh, and kudos for running numbers before simply writing the "Ruby is dying!" blog post!

polysics2• 13 years ago

What do you reckon could not be legacy code in 15 years? C family, Java, maybe Erlang?

pionar• 13 years ago

I think what jerf means is that, being mostly used as a scripting and web language, it's easy to create legacy code in it. Remember ColdFusion? PHP 3?

However, more to your point, there's legacy C and Java code, but that's because those languages have evolved heavily in their time, so late 90s Java looks little like modern Java, and techniques used in C in the 80s would get you laughed at today.

Hell, even in my main language of work, C#, the difference between most code just 4 or 5 years ago and "modern" C# is vast.

delluminatus3• 13 years ago

Not the OP, but I would expect to see still widely used:

* Python - As a programming language for scientists and researchers, replacing Matlab and kin.

* Go or Rust - A well-designed, modern language, easier to use than C++ but almost as fast, for enterprise applications or video games. Not sure about Google, but I hope Mozilla will still be around in 10 years.

* Lua? - Not sure about this one... but it fills a niche -- extremely compact scripting language.

* C - still used in system-level programming

* C# - C# is replacing Java as the OO language of choice for big enterprise systems.

jerf5• 13 years ago

I expect the JVM to still be going; at least one of Clojure or Scala will probably continue growing for a long time, and there's room for both. It's also possible another Algol-esque language that isn't Java, but is syntactically closer to Java, making people more comfortable, will arise. At some point one of them may even become the "primary" JVM language, with Java hanging on as legacy, but due to the fact Java just compiles to the JVM, there won't be any reason to get rid of it, as the maintenance effort is virtually 0. I expect C# to probably still be going. I'm not sure anything can actually kill C, even though something really should.

C++ I can see going either way; it is a freakishly complicated language (and getting more complicated with every standard that comes out) that IMHO was primarily kept aloft by being the "default" language in Windows for a very long time. I expect Rust will be most of the way through eating it alive in 15 years. Or something like Rust, but Rust is looking pretty solid. And if you want a multithreaded systems language... and you will... I suspect in practice it's going to be an order of magnitude easier to program in than C++ in another three or four years. Maybe Rust will even be eating C. (About damn time!) Someone will probably be writing an OS kernel in Rust. Possibly one that is driver-compatible with Linux, or even just straight-up a Linux-compatible kernel.

If Google doesn't drop the ball, Go will probably be mature and still going, and probably the primary reason why Ruby and friends are considered legacy code. Go even today very nearly replaces the scripting languages in flexibility (though definitely not quite), but brings back stronger typing and better performance. A few more tweaks to it over the next 5 years and it'll be hard to see why I'd start a new project in a "scripting" language. (Part of the reason I think this is that I observe that in the past 15 years, no language has penetrated into the A-list without some sort of major corporate backer. While there's plenty of other possibilities from a technical point of view, and while Google is not very aggressively pushing Go, I still think it's more support than any other language has or is likely to have in the near future. Even if they just passively continue to do little more than employ the authors, this is likely to continue floating up the ranks.)

And I still sort of expect something to come up that is not Haskell, but is closer to Haskell than anything currently existing. Or possible Haskell simply keeps plugging along and manages to become a very solid B-list language. I doubt it'll ever break into the A-list "nobody got fired for choosing C/C++/Java/C#" level of popularity, but it might settle firmly into where "it's pretty hard to get fired for choosing Python/Ruby/PHP" is today. (It's brushing B-list status now, but it's got a ways to go before I'd call it solid B-list.) I also think there's a good chance it will acquire a reputation as being the tool of choice for tackling truly complicated systems. (Though Rust will eat into the bottom end of that a bit too, they're currently retreating from some of the tools that Haskell has that may allow it to acquire this reputation. I think Haskell will still retain a strong advantage here.)

And finally, some sort of wildcard. 15 years ago I doubt anybody would have predicted Haskell being where it is now, even Haskell users (if you can even call it the same l. New languages shall continue to bubble and froth, but at least one and probably two will either emerge from the froth and become a B-list language. Probably at least one of them will be a aggressively "practical" language that will be a reaction to the success of "excessively-academic" Clojure, Scala, Rust, and the Haskell-like I hypothesize above, and follow a hype curve very similar to Ruby or Node.

It occurs to me I'm looking more like 10 years into the future here than 15. Oh well. Close enough. I'm also well aware I'm just talking out my ass; I completely expect to look back and laugh at this in 10 to 15 years. Oh well again.

ollysb2• 13 years ago

This is it. I'm blown away by how productive I am with rails now. A couple of weeks back I replaced an entire backend, complete with an oauth provider, record versioning, caching etc. and it took 4 hours! And all done with the usual TDD etc. This is all thanks to the gems that are available. Most of them are 2nd or 3rd generation, they're focused, battle tested and well documented. It might not be the right tool for every job but it's damn good at what it does. If the noise has died down it's because we're busy knocking out great apps.

taude• 13 years ago

Wait until you have to update your rails and all your gems are no longer compatible.

Edit: removed "update for a security patch" because it's just updated.

Edit: to be fair, this is a common situation with many similar solutions.

makomk• 13 years ago

I think Perl has already reached the state where it's mostly used in legacy code, at least for web development.

bmj3• 13 years ago

What about Catalyst? Or Mojolicious? Or Dancer? If it's just used in legacy code, why are there still healthy frameworks being produced (granted, these aren't as popular as Rails, but, Perl on the web is hardly in legacy mode)?

bgilroy26• 13 years ago

NYC financial firms are starting new projects all of the time where Perl is the main tool for feeding information here from over there.

Moto7451• 13 years ago

I work at a Perl based startup and we're writing new code and designing new systems all the time. There seems to be quite a few Perl shops in LA though most of them have been around for a long time.

mraj• 13 years ago

Wait? What????

jhardcastle• 13 years ago

A better title would have be, "Is Ruby Dying? Getting The Data." As others have pointed out, the data suggests no, it is not.

hobs• 13 years ago

But then it wouldnt be linkbait!

regularfry3• 13 years ago

Betteridge's Law Applies.

diminoten• 13 years ago

I was taught that if the title of an article or story asks a question, the answer is almost always, "No."

idoescompooters• 13 years ago

I know Ruby on Rails isn't!

danso2• 13 years ago

Ugh...must not take Lord's name in vain. 14 points in almost as many minutes? Is it so easy to get to the top of HackerNews on a holiday with such a loaded question? I can't imagine how many points the OP would've gotten if the title was "Is Ruby Dying Faster than MongoDB?"

That said, as a pro-Rubyist...well, I don't find much comfort in the OP's spurious assumptions about what the data can show. However, for those who think Ruby's time is limited or otherwise hate the language (or more specifically, Rails)...what do you think will take its place? Ruby seems popular because of its readable syntax...which is also a factor in its relatively slow performance...do you see an even more human friendly (and inefficient) language taking its place? Or do you think such a niche need not be filled?

That Ruby is so great for DSLs...I would hope that it can stay in that function as one of the better glue languages we have.

bulte-rs• 13 years ago

Cannot agree more with you on that last comment. I personally think - and hope, as a full-time Ruby dev at this moment - that Ruby will "recide" (big quotes here) to a more "humble" spot as a glue language; i.e. Perl's spot 10-15 years ago.

Not a bad spot to be in if I may say so.

weatherlight• 13 years ago

Ruby IS dying faster than MongoDB! Evidence to prove it! http://bit.ly/1c9vo1S

Sanddancer• 13 years ago

First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project. Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important, new kid in town be damned. Second off, number of package releases doesn't tell much about maturity of packages, developer involvement, or anything. Ruby's a mature language. It's quite feasible, and arguably desirable, for package releases to slow down in time. Styles have been developed, the urgency for new features to be rolled in Right Now is lessened, and the need for components that doesn't break on upgrades becomes more and more important. Yes, the novelty is gone. That isn't a bad thing. You know Ruby's strengths and weaknesses, you know how to use it, you know how not to use it. Jumping to a new language just because of all the jibber-jabber is not a practical thing at all.

Glyptodon3• 13 years ago

For all that, the more popular a language is the more packages are available and the easier it is to avoid reinventing the wheel and save time and effort.

Even the wrong tool for the job is a nice choice if someone's already done the work of making a square peg fit a round hole for you.

davidw• 13 years ago

the more popular a language is the more packages are available

And more people to hire, or to hire you, as well as books, mailing lists and so on.

Economists call this "positive network externalities", where the value of something increases with the number of people utilizing it.

Touche• 13 years ago

Finding the right tool for the job should be much much more important

That's the most overstated claim in programming. LESS is the "right tool for the job" when the job is styling web pages. Ruby is a general purpose programming language, the jobs it is good for is everything not covered by DSLs like LESS, the same as all other general purpose languages.

spellboots• 13 years ago

Not true. Ruby is great for a lot of stuff, but a very poor choice for e.g. scientific computing (scipy/numpy are a far better choice than the very immature sciruby), and plenty of other use cases where there are other "general purpose languages" that are far more suited to certain problems.

laureny• 13 years ago

Ruby is a general purpose programming language

I question that. Ruby is very slow, dynamically typed and suffers from scaling challenges because of its multithreading support.

I think Ruby is increasingly falling into a niche: prototyping. Get a prototype up and running in a few weeks and once the proof of concept is established, switch to a statically typed language on the JVM.

mortyseinfeld5• 13 years ago

First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project

Very wrong. There are languages that I believe I would be very productive in, but can't justify the time investment because the community is so small that the related tools/libraries/frameworks aren't there.

hosh2• 13 years ago

That's true if you're considering making something.

On the other hand, if you are learning a language or platform in order to expand your capabilities as a thinker and problem solver, then community size is less of a consideration.

morganherlocker2• 13 years ago

First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project.

I think there is a minimum threshold to this. I support a large application written in an extremely obscure language (it's basically me and 5 other people on an old yahoo mailing list that make up the entire community). It is terrible. No unit testing frameworks, no http framework for rest calls, no decent UI templating, and on and on. 100% of functionality that I need comes in the form of calls to command line tools.

Obviously, Ruby is way past that threshold, so I do not disagree with what you said at all, but just wanted to point out there is a limit. I would not write a new commercial application in any language today that did not already have strong package system. As one person, you can write a few essential modules that you need, but you cannot write all of them.

Solarsail• 13 years ago

Out of nearly-off-topic-curiosity, does this language have a website(page)? Was it new when you started your project? Have you been able to use libraries from other languages? Or is this really an island of 5 people? (Suddenly that sounds like Gilligan's island for devs)

mess• 13 years ago

Google trends:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python%20programming%...

Glyptodon3• 13 years ago

With javascript: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python%20programming%...

Encosia• 13 years ago

With node: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python%20programming%...

dnc• 13 years ago

They are roughly at the same level of google trend popularity if you use just language names (w/o 'programming'):

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python,ruby&cmpt=q

EDIT: This one is maybe more accurate (w/ 'programming' as selected category) and it shows that interest is roughly the same on average: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#cat=0-5-31&q=python,+ru...

frik• 13 years ago

Better search terms: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F06ff5%2C%20%2F...

Glyptodon3• 13 years ago

I didn't start using Ruby (or Rails) until this year. The language is nice and makes my top 3 language list.

That said, I find both Python/Django and Node.js both more productive than Rails for quickly building API-driven web-apps. More so this has to do with Rails, which has a number of warts and a tendency to require excessive configuration for all its pretty much patently false 'convention over configuration' spiels, than it does with Ruby.

If there's a problem with Ruby, it's the inseparability of it and Rails. As things like node make using non-JS languages server side less appealing, use of Rails will decline, making Ruby decline.

The main reason this hasn't happened is that there's not a standard groupthink-do-it-all toolkit for building things with node yet.

And even when it does happen it will take years and years to go away. Just look at PHP.

I'm going to go ahead and say it: Ruby will be the new PHP...

And yes, I think it's fair to assume that Ruby usage is vast majority tied to Rails.

sanderjd• 13 years ago

What is the criteria for being "the new PHP"? Do you mean that it will be used for the same kinds of projects as PHP is currently used for, or by the same types of developers or ...?

riffraff• 13 years ago

patently false 'convention over configuration' spiels

such as ?

Rails has plenty of warts but models still live in /app/models, classes are named after tables and all CRUD routes are defined with a single two-token line.

You are probably forgetting to consider what the world was like before this.

charlysisto• 13 years ago

my question : is ruby trying to get on pair with python regarding machine learning ?

chmartin2• 13 years ago

not even close. even lua is way ahead of ruby in machine learning !!!

maxehmookau• 13 years ago

Probably not.

thomasfedb• 13 years ago

Ruby is only dying in the sense that C is dead. It's not that exciting, but instead is widely used, including by companies.

Additionally, I doubt gem releases correlate with language 'vitality'. Fewer releases may simply indicate library stability.

mitchty• 13 years ago

Too true, I'm writing more C lately than ruby. Then again I'm not a rails fan and I need to interface with ioctls more than oauth or whatever. So C fits much better in my domain space.

That and command line apps in ruby, well there like perl with cpan modules, sheer pain to manage across systems. Versus static link in archive files and make a package.

jhawk28• 13 years ago

Ruby is maturing, not dying. It has lost much of its fadish hype.

stiff• 13 years ago

It is surely dying among those folks who only build one page apps and post them to blogs...

jhspaybar• 13 years ago

Developer discovers nodejs, drinks kool-aid, assumes other languages are dead or dying. News at 10.

romanovcode• 13 years ago

So true, I was expecting to see Node code in this article even without reading it and can tell already that your comment is the whole tl;dr story of this post.

After Node will stop being popular and "hip" author will probably make a new post saying "Is Node Dying?".

regularfry3• 13 years ago

...and then checks it with numbers.

alisnic• 13 years ago

after looking at the node code in the article, no.

dham5• 13 years ago

NodeJS, been there done that. Even with generators it makes doing task synchronously a royal pain(have you ever tried to write sql update code with transactions?). Until something comes a long to replace Ruby(https://github.com/mirah/mirah looks promising), I'll still use it. Ruby is a great scripting language, and it has one of the best(if not the best), web frameworks out there.

I definitely think MRI will die, and Ruby will live on in the JVM. I've been really impressed with JRuby and the advances they have made on that project.

Plus you also have projects like RubyMotion and the promising Opal(Ruby to JS).

pswenson2• 13 years ago

Mirah has almost zero usage, and it seems very little development is going on there. I'm on the Mirah google group and there have been 5 posts since October.

I love the idea, but it seems few are interested....

dham5• 13 years ago

Exactly. That proves my point. There are no Ruby like languages ready to replace Ruby right now.

tosseraccount• 13 years ago

Netcraft needs to confirm this, first.

mortyseinfeld5• 13 years ago

No, but BSD is.

virtualwhys• 13 years ago

TIOBE index for December 2013 says otherwise: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Ruby dropped 3 spots from this time last year (currently #13); if it is dying, it's dying slowly.

For my work on the JVM, Scala in comparison is way down at spot #31; Groovy #47, and Clojure doesn't even break the top 50.

Meanwhile F# is kicking some serious azz, soaring 27 spots in a single year to #20, impressive.

Ruby should be just fine for the next several years, assume will drop down into the 20s as the static typing + FP movement takes root in the enterprise.

2014 should be a fun year for the JVM: Java 8, Scala 2.11, a possible Kotlin release, and whatever Groovy and Clojure have planned.

dham5• 13 years ago

I used to look at the TIOBE index all the time, until I saw Visual Basic .NET jump a bunch of spots this year. I then started to question either TIOBE index or the people that are using Visual Basic.NET

kamaal5• 13 years ago

Not sure what to say about TIOBE. It bases its results on search engine trends.

They can't really tell the difference between Ruby(The stone) and Ruby(The language). Or Python(The snake) and Python(The language).

mountaineer• 13 years ago

Ruby is still holding its own in he HN hiring trends too[1]

[1] http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2013/...

steveklabnik4• 13 years ago

TIOBE results for Ruby won't be the same just quite yet, because December 25 is the traditional Ruby release date. Ruby will get a lot of press over the next week that's still in December, but wouldn't be counted yet.

vorg• 13 years ago

and whatever Groovy and Clojure have planned

Groovy's roadmap just added version 2.3, featuring "_Traits_", which were actually originally announced for version 2.2 [1], but were delayed so Codehaus could get a release of Groovy out the door in time for selling seats to their annual December GrailsXchange conference in London.

In June last year, Codehaus/Pivotal had also announced a new meta-object protocol for Groovy version 3.0 [2] to come after version 2.1, but that was postponed early this year to make way for version 2.2. I don't think Groovy really has anything "planned" as you put it, rather they're reacting to external conditions.

[1] http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Adding-Trait-to-Groovy-td...

[2] http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Groovy-3-tt5710334.html

kailuowang• 13 years ago

What do you guys think? Is Ruby dying? Did you once use Ruby and have now started to use something else?

I was using Ruby as my main language for 3 years before I switched to first Coffeescript and then Scala now. Personally I prefer the simplicity (a function is a function) of Coffeescript and the richness (so many things to fool around) of Scala over Ruby.

The popularity of languages don't die over the course of a couple of years. Projects with legacy code rely on them and maintenance of their libraries. And legacy code is very very hard to kill.

If the interest is in finding out the trend of the "favorability" of a language, it might be more accurate to survey how many green field software products(not libraries, which could be driven by the need of improving some legacy code) are choosing it. Unfortunately, such survey is more expensive to perform, and might be close to impossible to perform retrospectively to understand the trend. Given the fact that the "popularity" of a language isn't that important, the favorability is probably even less, such survey is probably hard to justify.

rubiquity4• 13 years ago

Ruby isn't dead. It's stabilizing now that all of the language hipsters have moved onto Go/Node.js/Scala/Clojure to recreate a bunch of mini Web libraries to try and make names for themselves in the new languages.

Ruby's best days are still far away.

blt• 13 years ago

The author must be pretty wet behind the ears if they think a blog audience will want to read huge blocks of mundane javascript code with console logging and error handling.

swordfish0321• 13 years ago

Pure Hacker News bait.

Mc_Big_G• 13 years ago

As always, the answer to posts with a question as the title, is no.

nikoma• 13 years ago

I have been working with Ruby and RoR for a few years now after using C# and Java. I now can put together web apps or APIs in hours vs days and integrate it with about anything out there from other APIs, using gems wrapping them or other gems for integration like redis, rabbitmq etc you name it. I have never ran into issues of incompatible gems I could not fix myself in a short period of time. It's incredible productive and reasonable fast. I am dealing with data reads/writes in the ten thousands of records per second and when something smells like bottleneck you still can throw in a native extension or use jruby and call java libs. If you are building all you do with boilerplate activerecord or other ORMS you just don't use it right. Flexibly is key. I think every challenge has it's best tools. I tried grails, play, spring mvc and other frameworks but promise that I can beat every of these frameworks in terms of development speed. Ruby is far from being dead and has a huge community. Having that said its always good to also stay up to date with other tools. For many deploying rails apps is a pain so why not throwing in warbler and deploy a war file to an app server...seconds later, boom, online and scalable. I could go on for hours:) I am a fan and so are our shareholders.

ibstudios• 13 years ago

If there is one person working on the next version of ruby it is not dead.

jruby and rubinius close the performance gaps. (This is an arguement for only knowing one language.)

chmartin2• 13 years ago

Ruby is like Disco. It was fun for a while, but now it is old news.

I was forced to learn Ruby while at Aardvark, as well as the Rails and the Agile process.

It was true today as it was then; Ruby, Rails, and Agile are absolutely useless for real data science and machine learning, and this is what companies need to move forward. Indeed, to bring machine learning tech to the Aardvark team, I had to fight tooth and nail against the Rails consultants and the Agile process guys.

Ruby is a useful gateway language for learning other modern scripting languages such as python, lua, and scala

I agree that Ruby is now legacy technology. Let me be clear; I use it all the time. It is useful to build stable projects based on solid ideas, and I use it for dev ops, for crawling the web, and for making simple DSLs. Chef is very good (compared to, say, Ansible) , and the Bundler deployment system is quite nice. It is easy to build web endpoints in Sinatra, and the Nokogiri gem is a pleasure to work with compared to, say, java JSoup.

But Ruby is not moving the needle forward. It does not even have a decent NumPy-like module, which makes it completely useless for modern back end work in data science, machine learning, and the real things companies need to generate revenue

Rails is a good example of being overspecialized. They are so good at web programing circa 2007 that the future passed them by.

Python. Lua. Scala. Closure. These are the future.

nkcode• 13 years ago

graph only shows that all smart coders switched to ruby and it is steady updating

also most gems in all areas are good enough already

ChiperSoft• 13 years ago

That's a fifteen year graph, and does appear to depict a decline at the end. I'd like to see this data rescaled to just the last six months (unfortunately his data files are 404ing now).

If you want to find out if TV sales are declining, you don't compare against the 1950s.

Is Ruby Dying?

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