Comment by 8n4vidtmkvmk
14 hours ago
I don't know a lot about Ruby, but I'd wager what its missing is a hero app or framework. Ruby on Rails got folks interested for awhile, but I guess other frameworks won out. What left does it have? What domains does it excel at?
Python has ML. JS has web. C/C++ has performance. Rust is stealing a slice of that thanks to safety.
That probably covers like 99% of things, at least from my world view. There are arguably other better languages but it doesn't much matter if the community all flocks to the well established ones.
There is no single established framework/language for backend Web development. There are many options, all valid, differing in popularity based on their qualities (or sometimes just hype).
Ruby used to be cool around 2010, but it lost to better options. Ruby has strange syntax, and Rails abuses magic, so I guess the viability of TypeScript for development made Ruby less popular.
> Ruby used to be cool around 2010, but it lost to better options.
I'd argue that it lost the cool kidz mindshare but not to better options. People jumped to Node.js because of async but in the end the relevant industry change was the switch to SPA based architectures in the web space. Rails never embraced that approach and hence lost the popularity.
Jump 15 years ahead, and now the Enterprise world is built with React and Angular apps, not with JSPs or Spring MVC apps. Can Rails do a comeback? Who knows, but it's still a bona fide web development stack with terrific productivity gains for those who want to optimize that metric.
IMO I think that the industry will start to move away from React and Angular. These apps take too much developer time for basic functionality, are too slow, and too much of a maintenance burden. The Future^TM is HTMX like functionality, which Rails is very well positioned for with Turbo + Stimulus. I rewrote some pages that had Rails backends with React front ends to Turbo + Stimulus, and the code base size drastically shrank, the performance increased, the maintenance time for features dropped, and it was even more reactive than before.