Is Ruby On Rails Losing Steam?

itwbennett writes: In a post last week, Quartz ranked the most valuable programming skills, based on job listing data from Burning Glass and the Brookings Institution. Ruby on Rails came out on top, with an average salary of $109,460. And that may have been true in the first quarter of 2013 when the data was collected, but "before you run out and buy Ruby on Rails for Dummies, you might want to consider some other data which indicate that Rails (and Ruby) usage is not trending upwards," writes Phil Johnson. He looked at recent trends in the usage of Ruby (as a proxy for Rails usage) across MS Gooroo, the TIOBE index, the PYPL index, Redmonk's language rankings, and GitHut and found that "demand by U.S. employers for engineers with Rails skills has been on the decline, at least for the last year."

Comments

How about over 10 years?

[EMG at MU]

Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[BreakBad]

..to find the lowest paid programmers and hire them to program in the highest paid language at a discount. I only say this because PHP is not on the list.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years ago HTML was "hot" ..

Re:How about over 10 years?

[jones_supa]

That was 20 years ago.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[geekmux]

Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.

We can cram the internet boom, a dot-com bubble, a dot-com crash, 9/11, the birth of DHS, and a rather massive banking failure that almost crashed the entire global economy inside a span of 10 years.

With factors like that going on all around your number, I'm not quite sure what value you can expect out of your salary stats. The only thing we've managed to sustain over the last 10 years is chaos. IT is hardly immune.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years ago there was PHP, and Java, and JavaScript. 10 years later, you still can't write anything web without HTML, it's just not "cool" to say so.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first release of Rails was only 8 years ago.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[Lunix Nutcase]

That's never fazed an HR department.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[jambox]

Come now, it's not as if that will ever happen again...

"Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rainforest scare a few years back: our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?"

Re:How about over 10 years?

[lgw]

With factors like that going on all around your number, I'm not quite sure what value you can expect out of your salary stats

Software developers who don't work on web UI frontend stuff: infrastructure and systems programmers, kernel developers, and so on, were barely affected by all that. 2007-08 was rough for everyone, but even then it wasn't that bad for us backend devs.

Now, if your expertise was DB internals, hard cluster internals, or user-mode storage software, those fields have gradually faded over the past decade, but many of us just moved on to the new hotness: the backend for the cloud, and massively parallel systems that can run in the cloud (external or internal).

Re: How about over 10 years?

[davester666]

...because you don't "write" html. you get something else to write it for you.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[__aaclcg7560]

Hand coding your own HTML pages is a lost art these days.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[tbannist]

Much like making your own shoes and it's a lost art for similar reasons.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[__aaclcg7560]

If you know how to hand code HTML, you can determined what went wrong with the HTML that another program spits out. As a QA tester at one company in the late 1990's, I wrote many tickets for the website team to fix the HTML that Dreamweaver and FrontPage generated.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[Tablizer]

They just ask for 15 years of experience in R&R regardless....and get it (per claims).

Several coders once told me, "you gotta learn to lie better" when I was struggling to find a new gig. Dealing with HR is a game.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[houstonbofh]

They just ask for 15 years of experience in R&R regardless....and get it (per claims).

That's ok. They are "Billable" years.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[nickittynickname]

More than ever it's important to have complete control over your HTML structure. We need to cater to more browsers and screen sizes than ever. Sure, templates you only write once, but you still need to re-template or rewrite new components. For redesigns, css isn't to a point that html structure doesn't matter so it's still important to reorder elements or change nesting. If your talking about point and click tools, I've never found them to be as quick as a good IDE with code completion.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[Bob Gelumph]

HTML is trivial though. There's almost nothing to it, unless you're including JavaScript, which opens up more possibilities.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[__aaclcg7560]

You have obviously never dealt with designers who couldn't write HTML to get themselves out of a paperbag. Over ten years ago, most web designers were graphic artists who could use either Dreamweaver or FrontPage. Show them trivial HTML, they saw alphabit soup.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[Bob Gelumph]

You're talking about designers. The thread is about programming.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[__aaclcg7560]

The thread was about programs that generated HTML code. Over ten years ago, Dreamweaver and FrontPage produced horrible HTML. As someone else pointed, people don't write HTML anymore because another program generates it for them.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[Aighearach]

If you know how to hand code HTML, you can determined what went wrong with the HTML that another program spits out. As a QA tester at one company in the late 1990's, I wrote many tickets for the website team to fix the HTML that Dreamweaver and FrontPage generated.

If you have custom made shoes, your cobbler can take those shoes apart in a few years, determine which parts took the most wear, and replace them. You get a shoe that is better than new, with the broken-in parts that didn't wear still in place. That makes for a better than new fit. And the new fit on a custom shoe is already pretty awesome.

There are still people doing it, there is even a local cobbler who will teach people to make their own shoes at home, in exchange for making 1 pair of shoes for him to sell in his store. That is the bottom end, though. I was pricing some custom shoes and there are a number of people doing it in the $3000-5000 range.

I still hand-code much of my HTML. But it absolutely does NOT bring the advantages it used to. The frameworks produce polished output these days.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[nblender]

HTML is trivial to learn. I use "" and "" for everything. I used "" once... I also used "" once too but that was a stretch goal.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[nblender]

oh crap.

---
HTML is trivial to learn. I use "<pre>" and "</pre>" for everything. I used "<img>" once... I also used "<blink>" once too but that was a stretch goal

Re:How about over 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I never took a hit, pay cut or anything that whole time. There were a few years of bread and butter raises, but me and most of my friends saw 100% or more in raises those 15 years. I figure most of us were making about $75,000/yr before Bush, staggered a lot during Bush and then doubled or much more since. I honestly haven't seen a single person with problem solving skills, intelligence and ambition have even one bad day.

For the record, I was a computer scientist with a focus on algorithms, compiler design, vision and compression with a side hobby which popped up accidentally of acoustic echo cancellation. I was 25 when the dot com bubble bust, I have no formal education and no high school diploma and no certifications. I went from about $75000 to $150000 in that position. I've done much better since switching careers.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[rtb61]

You are like that farmer that whines when they get paid bugger all for a crop that raked in huge profits for the few farmers that planted it last season, just like all the other farmers that switched to the high profit crop.

Demand does not function on it's off but is a partner with supply. When supply fails to meet demand, price rises and when supply exceeds demand price drops. There was an interesting period where old cobol programmers were paid heaps, not because there was growing demand but because no one was learning the language and supply of skilled coders had dropped right off and although very little new code was written, existing code had to be maintained.

A tricky point on the supply side, the easier the language is to learn and use, the more readily coders will learn it and of course the greater the supply. You also have to be careful with regard to the realistic stabilisation of applications. Change in applications now is largely driven by greed, with forced incompatibilities created purposefully to require purchasing the same software over and over again, they toss in some GUI changes to create the public relations illusion of a better product. Eventually this is going to hit a real wall, customers will no longer accept fake upgrades that waste huge sums in licence fees, retraining costs, installation costs and hardware upgrades, all with zero new benefit to the customer.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I own and operate a web development studio.

The number of "programmers" that can't write HTML to standards is staggering. If you don't know how to hand format a complex web page then you are NOT a web developer & won't find yourself qualified for much at my studio.

This is basic 101 stuff. If you don't know it I consider you to be just plain lazy and not worth my time (employment-wise).

We want people able to work on the fly and understand what they need to do across the board when it comes to the sites we develop. You need to understand HOW the Internet works AND how to solve problems. Not knowing complex HTML standards = useless web developer.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Frameworks output "polished" code my foot. HTML is as important to understand today as it was 15 years ago. If you don't do it well you can't find a web dev job anywhere at my studio. If you are a web developer, you better know this stuff, period.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

This!

Web dev's don't listen to this "...you don't new to know HTML well" crap. It's complete fud.

Take it from a web dev employer in Seattle - you need to not only KNOW it, but know it very, very well if you want to be considered for a job at my studio. This is a fact and one which should be heeded. Every single one of these folks are hacks if they say I'll even LOOK in your direction if you don't know HTML standards like the back of your hand.

It is required or find another career.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

find problems you are interested in solving and solve them with the tools you know the best and enjoy coding in. The wonderful thing about programing is that general purpose languages allow you to build the tools and infrastructure you need. If your ambition is to be an employee, then play the language, skills game. If you can, the more satisfying option is to embrace the tools that suit you and make your own opportunities. Its not always easy or obvious. Put your trust in God and jump.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. In the last 15 years my salary has gone up 310% and total comp by 367%. I once took a reduction in base salary, but that came with an increase in total comp. The longest it has taken me to find a new job was 8 weeks, which was during that little recession near the end of last decade.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[jwhitener]

...because you don't "write" html. you get something else to write it for you.

Hand coding your own HTML pages is a lost art these days.

What sort of systems are you guys involved with that you don't have to manually modify HTML structure to line up with what your CSS/JS guys need or want?

Some HTML output is automated, but you still need a thorough understanding of what the HTML tag options are, what needs to be in the HEAD section, the overall flow of the page html for ADA checking, etc..

I use php, java/jsp, coldfusion, velocity templates/Liferay portal type systems, etc.. and still need to carefully think about html structure in my projects. What sort of workflow using what sort of framework/language allows you to produce a finished and styled web application without tinkering with HTML tags?

Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether or not you believe it was the world's most hipster programming language, they tried to sell it as a license to print money. And it is so clearly not. All the businesses with any real money either roll their own languages for in-house challenges, opt for something off the shelf and easy to recruit for, or have mountains of legacy code that merely needs to be maintained.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the parent modded down?

It's a very accurate description of real world Ruby on Rails apps.

Many adopters have been badly burned by this software, and the people who pushed it.

Failed projects, slow and broken apps, and fleeing developers are the hallmarks of Ruby on Rails.

It's much worse than Java was in the early 2000s, or C++ in the 1990s, or C and COBOL before that.

Ruby on Rails sounds great, until you try to use an app written in it, or worse, until you have to deal with a Rubyist. Then everything tends to go to hell.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Normal people, including programmers, just got tired of dealing with the Ruby crowd. No normal person wants to deal with smug, "opinionated", Zed Shaw-inspired hipsters who swear all the time, and who also often exhibit an unusual disdain for women. It's even worse when, despite all their talk and hype about how great Ruby and Rails are, they still wrote worse software than the well-mannered and normal PHP, Java and Python programmers.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[maligor]

I would _never_ agree to work for a business which chooses the wrong tool for the job because said tool is "cool". Either they use an appropriate language, of I choose which language to use.

Virtually all Ruby shops fit into that first statement - wrong tool for the job, but do it because it's "cool".

Interesting, I don't personally care much about languages unless it's just plain bad idea in terms of performance, like say doing scientific HPC on pure interpreted python. If someone wants to pay me to reinvent the virtual wheel, I don't really mind. The language itself is just a tool, and having used C for almost 20 years now, I still tend to lookup standard function calls from the man. It's not like using a different language would be any different aside from missing man pages.

I do wonder if people hate languages because their favorite IDE Product X doesn't support Language Y. My favorite "IDE" is called vim, it's not too hard to add language support to it, but it will take decent chunk of time.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for informing us you don't really work in the industry.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he's as clueless as you are.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

I hated it for other reasons. Mostly I hated it because it looked like the bastard child of shell scrpting and Pascal, and ran orders of magnitude more slowly. The fact that hipsters latched on was just one turd piled on another. The fact that it had some Lisp-like aspects was not enough to redeem it. If I wanted Lisp, I'd just use Lisp.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[TheRaven64]

Indeed. I always found it entertaining to see what was going on in Ruby-land: concepts from 20-30 years ago that other languages had explored (and often discarded having discovered major issues with them) being touted as new and shiny and one of the reasons why Ruby is great. Rails itself is something of an example of this: NeXT's WebObjects (of which there's been an open source reimplementation in the form of GNUstepWeb since the mid '90s) had a very similar model and was the first (or possibly second, depending on exactly how you count, but within a couple of months either way) ever web-app development framework. 20 years later, Rails is a new and exciting way of developing data-driven web applications that is completely different from anything that's come before!

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[james_in_denver]

Redmine project management tool is an awesome ruby on rails app.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure all 3 users are thrilled with it.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Aighearach]

I don't think I've ever heard of Zed talking about how great Ruby on Rails is.

http://harmful.cat-v.org/softw...

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading comprehension. Do you have it?

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Aighearach]

Ruby is not used because it is "cool," and as somebody using Ruby for 10 years now, it is total hogwash. It is absolutely not encountered.

Ruby is chosen by managers because it is popular with programmers who use it and based on that you can hire a lot of talented people. There is significant competition for programmers, and using languages that are pleasant to program in is a real advantage.

And of course, it is chosen by programmers because it is pragmatic and modern OO without a bunch of ideological bullshit. And there is a really clean C interface, you can write your entire "Ruby" application in C if you want. And in fact, the majority of library code is in C.

The truth is, when you have a modern high-level language on top of a very simple, low level C API, that can access all language features, it can become difficult to find a job it is a demonstrably poor tool for. Even if I have a lot of stuff that I want to be in C, it is still nice to have the higher level application flow in a modern OO language.

Most things, Ruby gives 2 interfaces; high level modern, and thin wrapper over the old *nix C libs. Networking is done that way, for example. There are a wide variety of networking classes providing different levels of interface, all the way down to thin wrappers for C sockets.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Half-pint HAL]

Two words: type safety.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Ruby isn't cool. It's hipster "cool".

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[blackomegax]

Who needs code speed? We've got 4ghz haswells that'll brute any application to decent speed.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's still dog slow.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[anchovy_chekov]

I'd agree here. As someone who started his career in Smalltalk, and then had to give it up for the lack of programming jobs available (10 years of my life becoming an expert in Delphi I'll never get back) Ruby wasn't so much "cool" as "beautiful". It felt like a coming home - an expressive, easy to read language where the answer to "how do I do X?" is "What's the most obvious way." A language predicated on programmer joy is a pretty sweet thing.

I think the Ruby world can be divided into two camps. There's the "we are nice, because Matz is nice" crowd that were dominant in the early days. When I was a newb I found the community very helpful, very welcoming. Then we got the "DHH is a prick, so we are pricks" bunch. I don't think they were ever in the majority, but they were loud and obnoxious and fit the mould of "hipsters". I don't think this is particular to Ruby though. Every community has its wankers, every community has its good citizens.

I still love Ruby for what it is, and am thankful I've been able to carve out a reasonably well-paying career based on it.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Aighearach]

Ruby has good type safety because while it is dynamically typed, it is also strongly typed. It is just a straw-man. People actually using Ruby know if type safety is an issue, or not. ;) (hint: not)

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Kergan]

One more: immutable.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Those words don't mean what you think they mean.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me all these companies with money that "roll their own languages for in-house challenges"...

Frameworks possibly, although even that has become uncommon, but languages? Companies don't develop their own languages for web development.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to frequent the bar where a Austin on Rails goes to socialize. "Hipster" is not the word I'd use. "Geeks" would be more accurate. Hipsters don't wear boring backpacks, shuffle their feet and stare at the floor while walking into a bar. No hipsters and only one women.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Google, Apple and Microsoft come to mind.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Half-pint HAL]

Those words don't mean what you think they mean.

Ah yes. I see what you mean. Too long away from computing...

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Half-pint HAL]

One more: immutable.

And to expand on that: backtracking -- you can't roll back once you've destroyed your data. Right now, I'm engineering something using backtracking in Python, and any accidental mutation is a bloody bugger to track down.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Pseudonym]

I take it you haven't jumped ship to JIRA yet. Everyone else has.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Pseudonym]

PHP programmers are considered "normal" these days? Only by comparison to the Ruby crowd.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

For any web or server side task short of intense number crunching, ruby is the ideal tool for the job to balance functionality, on time delivery, quality and scalability (thanks to jRuby). I've been doing this for 17 years as a programmer, contractor, lead developer, business owner, project manager and now part of an architecture team at a much larger company. In that time and experience of seeing things from a lot of different perspectives when comparing with the Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Go, JS/Node, Groovy, Scala, C#, and Python its the clear winner in balancing all concerns effectively. Python is a close second with everything else way behind.

The only reason Python is second is because of how much more active and useful jRuby is compared to jython and that is largely because ruby benefits tremendously more from the JVM than Python does. Without jRuby in the mix the winner would be Python. Go is the most likely future disruptor based on what I've seen so far but time will tell.

If you are seriously calling Ruby a "because it's cool decision" you need to shelve some bias and get a lot more experience.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[segedunum]

No normal person wants to deal with smug, "opinionated", Zed Shaw-inspired hipsters who swear all the time...

It's funny that those are exactly the people who Zed Shaw railed against.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[devent]

Would should I switch from a open source project management software to a propritary software?
http://www.redmine.org/project... is fast as hell.
Compared to, for example Seping JIRA https://jira.spring.io/browse/... it's way faster and not confuluted.

Re: Everyone hates Ruby

[haploc]

Redmine is a nice Ruby app when you get it installed. But upgrading can be a pain when you are not a Ruby adept, and it requires the latest Ruby gems for its dependencies, which are not in your distro's main repositories.. It turned into dependency-hell.

Re:Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, it managed to utterly destroy (not in capability, but usage/popularity) perl as a web language -- which people treat as a quaint language for web dev, now.

Re:THE FUCKING TAGLINE

[CodeReign]

A better tagline:

Still better than reddit, so shut up and assimilate.

It's the Twitter effect

[Anonymous Coward]

One they dropped RoR "because of performance", lots of other people decided not to try it.

There's lots of faddishness and follow-the-leader in business IT. When one of the lead dogs does something, the pack falls in line. Map Reduce/Hadoop is an excellent example.

Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[AltGrendel]

Just wondering what the new darling programing language is.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

node

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

JS mostly...maybe Go. Both due to performance.

Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaScript / node.js

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[tigersha]

I swear I did not think I would live to see the time where JavaScript was picked for performance...

Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't. JavaScript is still only picked out of idiocy, ignorance, or a mix of the two.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go is definately making in-roads, but Javascript has a definate draw ... which is great because 90% of the NodeJS code I see should be dowsed with holy water and burnt.

Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Javascript is picked to get client information, or to have the client do all the crunching instead of an overloaded server. Obviously there are times when Javascript should not be implemented due to security reasons, but it has its uses.

Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, try again. We are talking about server-side JavaScript here!

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[fourbadgers]

Go, for anything to do with 'The Cloud'. There seems to be a lot of people with backgrounds in ruby and python getting into Go. and node for a lot of the JS people getting into backend stuff.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[gregor-e]

Just wondering what the new darling programing language is.

Why, Perl 6, of course. As soon as it's done.

Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Tablizer]

JavaScript is widespread because of "QWERTY syndrome". It's available everywhere simply because it's available everywhere...unfortunately.

(It's fine for light-duty "gluing and scripting", but people are trying to do OS-like things with it.)

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Tablizer]

C# - As a language, ignoring MS's platform-lockage API games, it seems to tick off the fewest. And one can use its brother, VB.Net, if they don't like the punctuation-heavy style and/or prefer type descriptors on the right of variable names.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[TheRaven64]

As with C before it, the fast languages are the ones where people have invested a lot of time and effort in the compilers. JavaScript is pretty horrible to compile, but there's no reason why languages like Java or Ruby would be slow, other than effort. The Ruby implementation is pretty slow, but it's also pretty simple. Go and C had the advantage of being able to get fairly good performance from a simple compiler, but if you compare a modern GCC or Clang to an early C compiler you'll see a massive performance improvement. A modern JavaScript implementation employs all of the techniques from Self and Smalltalk, as well as some new tricks (in particular, loading time is far more important for JavaScript in a web browser than any other language). If you look at the WebKit JavaScript implementation, it has four different implementations (a bytecode interpreter, a simple fast JIT, an optimising JIT and a more complex optimising JIT) and promotes code to the later ones as it appears on hot paths.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Tablizer]

Then name a language Cloud++ and it will fly off the shelves (even if it's a steaming mass of unicorn farts).

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[PmanAce]

Almost. AngularJS.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Tablizer]

It's what the next Duke Nukem will be written in.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go isn't on the list. Js and Python.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Aighearach]

Yeah, Ruby remains slightly slow because we trade code clarity for speed. The speed and memory usage have both improved drastically over the years, to where now performance is quite good. Not leading, of course. Because only optimization and changes that retain simplicity are used. We don't care about runtime speed, though we increase it when we can do so without giving anything up. What matters more is that we can scale horizontally well, and maintain portability without a lot of repetition and platform-specific gobblygook.

Ruby has an awesome C API, where everything in "Ruby" is also available in C, and so something that needs tight loops and bare-metal whatever, we can do that, and still have a high level interface to whatever we did. We can do the hard parts in C, and still have the app logic that ties it together in Ruby. So you don't even hit a wall where "this software should be in a different language," or "this tool doesn't work for this job." Instead you get, "this class should be implemented in C."

So however fast the C compiler's code is, our code can be that fast if we need it to be. And the Ruby interpreter can remain optimized for readability and ease of bug-fixing. It is like having a whole toolbox and being allowed to use more than one tool for a job. A lot of languages, you choose a tool from the toolbox, and now you have build everything with it, with the only ways around that involving networked interfaces.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[phantomfive]

Just wondering what the new darling programing language is.

Python + Javascript, or just Javascript (via node.js or similar). Everyone is trying to make a Javascript framework. Everyone is trying to find the good parts of Javascript.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[phantomfive]

C# - As a language, ignoring MS's platform-lockage API games, it seems to tick off the fewest.

The biggest problem with C# (and the Microsoft ecosystem in general) is the lack of documentation. There are definitely some interesting ideas, like entity framework, but figuring out details when things aren't working is a real pain because of the poor documentation.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaScript on the server with Node.js and on the browser with any of those single page app frameworks.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Lunix Nutcase]

The biggest problem with C# (and the Microsoft ecosystem in general) is the lack of documentation.

lolwut

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[phantomfive]

Yeap. It's amazing how much documentation they can have, and still make it difficult to find what you need.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Desler]

I've done C# programming for 6 years and have never had any issues finding documentation and examples from MSDN. Do you have a specific example of what you have been unable to find documentation on?

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[phantomfive]

Yeap, but I'll have to get back to you after thanksgiving. Stuff in the ado.net entity framework. I even bought the entity framework book.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

PSA: Code clarity doesn't have anything to do with making a compiler that outputs slow binaries.

The more you know.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[perryizgr8]

C# is probably the best documented language right now (apart from C/C++). Please pay a visit to MSDN.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

MSDN is pretty good, but unlike an open source language's doco it needs to be really fantastic. It can be so frustrating to dig through MSDN documentation only to have the page which should describe the method you're trying to use be something like (paraphrasing) "Yeh, execute this method for stuff". No mention of overloads/parameters or anything. At least if you could decompile the method you might see what its doing and how. Lets say you want to use System.Net.WebClient.Downloadfile(). You can go to the MSDN page to learn that it takes strings or URI objects as input, but you wont read much of anything about what happens under the hood or how to change the way it does things. It says it executes "RETR" on an FTP file URI. It fails to mention the default behaviour of sending text encoding OPTS or setting file type to I. Packet capture will reveal that of course. But is this really the best doco?

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[phantomfive]

Java is without a doubt better. Not only is the documentation better, if there's a problem, I can actually look at the code.

Of course, C# has recently improved somewhat in that respect.

Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[segedunum]

LOL, try again. We are talking about server-side JavaScript here!

The worst possible use. JavaScript used for sever software is a perfect example of idiotic web programmers meddling in things they shouldn't be going anywhere near.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[segedunum]

PSA: Code clarity doesn't have anything to do with making a compiler that outputs slow binaries.

It actually does once you realise the implications of creating a higher level language in the quest for said code clarity and more to the point, developer productivity. That's a trend that should be pretty obvious to anyone who feels qualified to comment on this topic.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a trend that should be pretty obvious to anyone who feels qualified to comment on this topic.

Let me respond in kind, you're a fuckwit if you think that "code clarity" has anything to do with a higher level language. There are plenty of higher level languages with less code clarity than C.

Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Warning: opinion below!

I'm not a C programmer. I enjoy programming in higher level languages and I love the expressiveness of Ruby's syntax. However, the problem with the C support in Ruby is that, IN GENERAL, C programmers don't use Ruby and Ruby programmers don't use C. Your average Ruby programmer writes a function in Ruby, it runs in 20ms, and they think, "20ms is great." Then they write another 20ms function, then a 30ms function, and eventually you have an application feature that takes 3 seconds to run because it's calling all these 20-30ms functions. At this point, where do you insert your C? Rewrite the whole chain in C? The average Ruby programmer isn't going to do that. Big applications aren't full of single functions that can be rewritten in C to make the whole application faster. They're full of many of these not-quite-fast-enough functions. To make a difference, you would generally need to rewrite very large chunks of your application. I'm going to assume that most people don't do this. This isn't Ruby's fault of course; just human nature really.

Was that a correct use of the semicolon or should that have been a comma?

Re: Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[Aighearach]

Complete nonsense, most of the libraries are in C, and writing C is a regular part of a Ruby programmer's job.

If all you do is Rails, and not Ruby generally, then of course you won't be touching C. If you're the person writing the libraries that the Rails people will use, then you're using C frequently, even if it is only to write Ruby bindings for things. It is really more often about interfacing than speed. C is the general purpose interface language.

Using the Ruby C API you can write individual methods in C, and others in Ruby. The fact that you can re-open classes at any time means that isn't even a discrete feature, it is just the natural way things work.

As to which parts might get rewritten... the parts that were bottlenecks according to the benchmarks or profiler, and nothing else.

Re:Ok, so what's the new flavor of the moment?

[phantomfive]

Here's one example. The SetLink() method. It isn't clear what a link is, or really why you would want to add one. It's also not particularly clear where to find that kind of information (the book doesn't mention anything about links).

"Is Ruby On Rails Losing Steam?"

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure hope so.

The tagline displays for me just fine

[Anonymous Coward]

for a split second anyway before it becomes a "(15)"

Re:The tagline displays for me just fine

[Anonymous Coward]

It displays for a split second for me too (in the <title>, but it's still fucking bullshit that they hide it immediately and it's no longer on the page itself.

Re:The tagline displays for me just fine

[wonkey_monkey]

How, exactly, would the appearance of six words on screen improve your Slashdot experience?

As a senior RoR developer of 7 years

[Dishwasha]

I spend more of my time writing javascript/coffeescript than Ruby.

Re:As a senior RoR developer of 7 years

[CachorroMaluco]

So, the culprit is NodeJs ?

Re:As a senior RoR developer of 7 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes due to execution speed and hype. But hype mostly :-)

Re:As a senior RoR developer of 7 years

[tigersha]

I would agree on that.

Re: As a senior RoR developer of 7 years

[Dishwasha]

I think you misunderstand my statement. I spend the most TIME writing in js/coffee (angular.js in particular). RoR is still the backend, but it's serving more as a thin API layer to backend data services. I also probably spend less time writing Ruby code because of better engineering which can be attributed to the language's elegance.

Re:THE FUCKING TAGLINE

[Wootery]

Tried Pipedot and SoylentNews?

Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby alive.

[Anonymous Coward]

For now at least, Chef seems to be the primary mover/shaker of Ruby-related stuff that I'm seeing anymore, otherwise I just don't encounter it at all.

Node? Check.
PHP? Forever.
Python? Sometimes.
PERL? Yes, I see this more than Ruby.

I'm just not seeing any new deployments of Ruby-based systems outside of Chef to manage those, and even there it's very minimal use of Ruby itself since most stuff is in templates and the like and not truly 'coding' in Ruby.

Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Narcocide]

Clients care about hosting costs. Clients care about employment costs. Ruby is not enough slower than most other stuff to matter to a good coder, but most employers avoid actually hiring coders who are that good; they're too expensive and too hard to hold onto, and badly written Ruby is easily MUCH slower than badly written [anything else] for a number of circumstantial reasons. Hence, employers see Ruby as too expensive.

But a lot of this is definitely reinforced by hype.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be a valid point but i think that people thought mainly about putting their fronted js folks to the backend part so they kill 2 flies with 1 bullet. Wai...

But yeah...would you want to work for a company which cares about costs that much ? I would not.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Aighearach]

The thing is, if you assume the exact same idiots actually get hired either way, their bad Ruby isn't any worse than their bad PHP would be. So that is not different enough to matter in the evaluation. Good try though, it was almost coherent.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[SQL Error]

True. But bad Node.js code is faster than bad Ruby code. Will probably have even more bugs in it, though, because of the limitations present in both Javascript and Node.js.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Aighearach]

True. But bad Node.js code is faster than bad Ruby code. Will probably have even more bugs in it, though, because of the limitations present in both Javascript and Node.js.

False. There is no limit to how bad or slow bad code can be. The bad code will suck, and will get refactored.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Narcocide]

Try benchmarking some regular expressions in PHP and compare it to Ruby and then see if you can still say that with a straight face.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Aighearach]

If you know about the history of regex in Ruby, that one stands out as a complaint from 2005 or so recycled as FUD.

I'll give you a hint: Ruby doesn't use its own regex library...

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely false. Bad code is unreliable and wrong; it doesn't matter how fast it is. What, like, you can get the wrong answer faster than your competitors?

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Narcocide]

I wasn't talking about ereg* functions. PHP also links to PCRE (preg* functions) ... seriously, you should try some comparative benchmarks.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Aighearach]

Thanks for playing, but it isn't slow, and you haven't shown it to be slow. Benchmarks linked by google show Ruby to have faster regex than python, so clearly, fast enough to be used in the wild. ;) Oh yeah, we already knew Ruby is indeed used in the wild.

Post your benchmark results already, lets see it. Show that Ruby is so awful that it makes it untrue that "if you assume the exact same idiots actually get hired either way, their bad Ruby isn't any worse than their bad PHP would be." It would have to be so bad to make Ruby not even usable, but we know that isn't true.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Narcocide]

Look, these benchmarks have been widely published and are easily re-creatable. Do it yourself, like I said, or since you're familiar with google, use that. Irrelevantly bringing up Python or just responding "no, u" isn't acceptable.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Aighearach]

Thanks for playing, but you're accusing Ruby of having some deficiency so big that it isn't usable. That is complete nonsense. I'm a professional Ruby programmer, the idea that I would do some benchmark and find out, "golly gee, this is so slow nobody can use it. Derrrr" I mean, seriously. Ruby has been in use for decades, get over yourself. There is no possible way for you to suddenly discover that it is so slow that clients are wishing for PHP. It is laughable, because the usefulness of Ruby is not theoretical. It is being used in the wild.

It is up to the accuser to provide the benchmarks that show whatever they are accusing. You won't find them, because Ruby doesn't have slow regex, and is actually quite good at the text-munging tasks that involve lots of regex.

Re:Can't sell Ruby to clients.

[Narcocide]

But that's hardly what I'm accusing Ruby of whatsoever. I merely pointed out that its enough slower that its gained a bad reputation. I think you are the one who should get over yourself. You're obviously personally affronted by facts neither of us have direct control over, and unwilling to do the research yourself to prove your case.

php - ruby - node - ???

[slashdice]

It's called a fad.

Re:php - ruby - node - ???

[Anonymous Coward]

That again is called web development.

If it's losing steam it's because

[MillerHighLife21]

It's because it's hard to find people. For whatever reason, despite the demand, people get violently offended that Ruby is the 99% solution instead of the 80% solution and stubbornly refuse to just learn it. Short of fringe, extreme performance tuning use case that somehow jruby didn't manage to solve...Ruby is just about the ultimate general purpose language. From sysadmin to web to DSL to backend to volume and utility of open source libraries to a community focussed on developer efficiency and happiness...ruby is "the language". There is no other language out that that addresses all of these so effectively.

Ruby is an excellent language that makes a lot of very complicated things in programming simpler to achieve thanks to run time manipulation of the core language. Specifically things like dependency injection and modifying existing libraries to suit your purpose without having to touch the code of the core library and break your upgrade path or extending the class and then replacing every single usage of it with your subclass. This accelerates problem solving, eases the use of smaller pieces of code and the ENTIRE language and gem ecosystem is what it is because it takes advantage of it.

The demand has been there for years and because the demand is so high, it means Ruby people are hard to find. For many companies that means that they'll end up using whatever they can find people to code with. You'll get people using all manner of PHP frameworks. The "hey, I know Javascript! Let's use Node!" crowd. The Java EVERYTHING crowd that for some inexplicable reason would use languages that isolate you to only running on the JVM like Groovy, Scala and Clojure instead of using jRuby for all of the same benefits with code that is portable OUTSIDE of the JVM. Then there's the .NET crowd who are in their own little world (but will embrace Node and Go because they work well in their world too).

In so many cases, what companies use is based on who they can find to hire because demand for programmers is so high right now that becomes a determining factor everywhere.

The only language out there that is legitimately picking up steam in the "I am different in a meaningful way" sense is Go. In the mean time, believe me, all this Ruby code isn't going anywhere. Regardless of whether you're talking Rails, Puppet, Chef, Capistrano, Foreman, RubyDNS, the Gem ecosystem and every other standard bearer for how to do things that are emulated across other languages these days...Ruby's everywhere.

When I learned that on the fly I could inject or replace a method in a core object at load time and in 3 lines of code solve a system wide problem no matter what design pattern, coding style, or good/bad architectural decision was made by a previous developer it pretty much changed my life as a programmer. There is virtually no programming problem in a ruby application that makes me grumble because I "have to deal with it" or it will "take years to fix" because it's so easy to fix. This applies with open source libraries or legacy applications. That's why Ruby is awesome and the biggest reason that I'll never understand the people that want to hate it so much.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the article, my guess is with his salary he's probably too busy counting dollars to hear your laughter.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally agree. My co-workers really go a good laugh as we work on "big boy" projects for our multimillion dollar clients using a real language.

Fuck Ruby and those who support it.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

What "real language" are you using?

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[MillerHighLife21]

Umm...no. This is the stuff that makes no sense to me. Everything there is 100% accurate and even without Rails, Ruby itself is just about the ultimate utility language. There's legitimately no reason to avoid learning short of "I hate Ruby for no apparent reason".

Case in point, comments like this one.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Java

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you substitute visual basic in there and he could be straight out of 1998.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Find me somebody who can afford to use Java that isn't a multimillion dollar client. The development cycle is far too slow. Effective Java development is near impossible without an IDE managing background compilation for you. Code is fast as hell though. Props for that.

Lots of great, near bullet proof libraries out there but you can use all of them directly in jRuby code if you need them. And get a lot more accomplished in a shorter amount of time.

The formula for using Java requires time and money to not be a concern in exchange for performance. That's why "enterprises" use it but virtually no startups ever will. Good for you though.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Too busy counting his ones of dollars? Is he a mongoloid?

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[MillerHighLife21]

Yes. Clearly. Visual Basic was a sysadmin language, a standard bearer that's copied in every other language, used to write DNS tools, ported to run on the JVM and use Java libraries, and the DSL language chosen as the basis for most of the infrastructure management tools used today for the cloud....

Exactly the same.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's some reasons ruby is shit
1) dynamically typed. Good luck figuring out WTF type any random variable is at any point in time.
2) loosely typed. Oh yeah. It was a string, now it's a decimal
3) magic meaning to some symbols. Essentially stealing stupid shit from perl.
4) "operator syntax" because `foo.split.count` and `num to_s 16` should TOTALLY compile

That's 4 reasons off the top of my head to never use ruby for anything serious

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell me this is just a dedicated Poe's Law and that you aren't really that fucking stupid.

Ruby a sysadmin language? LOL. I've seen hundreds amd hundreds of such job postings and nary a one has even mentioned Ruby.
Ruby is the standard bearer for other languages? Double LOL.
It's used to write DNS tools? So what? Plenty of other languages have been as well.
Ported to the JVM? Yeah so was Python. And was so before Ruby.
DSL language of most cloud tools? Hahaha! [citation needed]

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not understand the overt hatred of Ruby in the programming community. When looking at discussions on make tools I often see people comment saying things like, "Rake [Ruby Make] is the best make tool, but you have to learn Ruby so lets use CMake [or anything else] instead." An aversion to learning Ruby because it is yet another scripting language to learn is understandable, but not when you have to learn ANOTHER language like CMake in its place.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

>Java
>fast

Never thought I'd see the day...

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Kielistic]

There is virtually no programming problem in a ruby application that makes me grumble because I "have to deal with it" or it will "take years to fix" because it's so easy to fix.

I'm going to have to assume that's because you've never seen Ruby used for anything more complicated than "display this html". Congrats on sounding like you work in a marketing department though. With your nice baseless assertions like:

When I learned that on the fly I could inject or replace a method in a core object at load time and in 3 lines of code solve a system wide problem no matter what design pattern, coding style, or good/bad architectural decision was made by a previous developer it pretty much changed my life as a programmer

I'm also not sure you should be allowed near anything more complicated that "display this html" with an attitude like that. The "bad architectural decisions made by previous developers" that people complain about are usually made by previous developers with that exact attitude.

Lack of organization and ad-hoc development rarely scales well.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Lunix Nutcase]

and the DSL language chosen as the basis for most of the infrastructure management tools used today for the cloud....

In what alternate universe? There are 23 such tools listed on Wikipedia and only 3 are written in Ruby and/or use Ruby as one of the DSLs for configuration. 13% is hardly "most".

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[jbolden]

Basically the above is: http://www.randomhacks.net/200...

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

You're clearly not as annoying at Ruby people. Sign me up.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[OverlordQ]

Specifically things like dependency injection and modifying existing libraries to suit your purpose without having to touch the code of the core library [...] When I learned that on the fly I could inject or replace a method in a core object at load time

That sounds like an utter nightmare. 2 + 2 = 4, except when we patched + to mean something else.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

When I learned that on the fly I could inject or replace a method in a core object at load time and in 3 lines of code solve a system wide problem no matter what design pattern, coding style, or good/bad architectural decision was made by a previous developer it pretty much changed my life as a programmer. There is virtually no programming problem in a ruby application that makes me grumble because I "have to deal with it" or it will "take years to fix" because it's so easy to fix. This applies with open source libraries or legacy applications. That's why Ruby is awesome and the biggest reason that I'll never understand the people that want to hate it so much.

I can answer in one word: maintenance

Sure, you can fix anything with a couple of lines of injected code. But after you and the rest of the developers on your team do this a few dozen times, good luck figuring out what's actually executing when things inevitably break.

I'm not saying that you can't write well-structured, maintainable RoR code, or that Ruby as a language is bad. There are lots of people doing really clean, useful stuff in it. That said, you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone who has worked on a large project over a number of years that 'you can patch anything at any time!' is a good thing.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Wdomburg]

Java is grand. Using jRuby to prototype, explore and extend is even better.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Half-pint HAL]

even without Rails, Ruby itself is just about the ultimate utility language. There's legitimately no reason to avoid learning short of "I hate Ruby for no apparent reason".

Really? No legitimate reason at all? Not even "I code embedded systems" or "I'm a carpenter"? Or less fascetiously, because typechecking makes debugging easier, so some people don't want to use a dynamically typed language.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubyists don't do maintainence. That would require working with "legacy" code (a dirty word in the hipster world) which is beneath them. They sling code and leave their chump employers holding on to the flaming bag of shit.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Or kernel development, DSP work, etc. There are tons of domains that Ruby is useless in. Unfortunately, the Rubyist is the ultimate "every problem looks like a nail" programmer.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Ruby should only be used for prototyping. Anyone who deploys it in production is insane.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Wdomburg]

1) anyObject.class

2) Um, no. Objects cannot magically change their class, period. You might assign a different object to a given variable, but the language is strongly typed.

3) Huh? There are relatively few symbols in Ruby, as a rule. Are you referring to special variables (like $: $0 etc?)? Those are ancillary and not considered idiomatic these days. Don't like them? Don't use them.

4) Why shouldn't they? The first is a just a chained method. No different than "foo.split(' ').length;" in Java. I'm assuming the latter is supposed to be "num.to_s 16", which would be "Integer.toString(num,16)" in Java, but that is just because the Java designers weren't nice enough to allow you to pass a radix argument to the non-static method. There is nothing in the language that would have precluded "num.toString(16);" being valid.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Tablizer]

Ruby will probably fail to go mainstream for the same reason Lisp has. It's wonderfully flexible in that it's almost a meta language that allows you to shape your "language" into just about any construct you want.

The downside is that everybody thinks different, and shaping a language to fit your head de-fits it for other heads. Standards are often preferred because they provide consistency between individuals and teams even when they don't perfectly fit a specific situation in terms of parsimony and compactness of expression.

The lesson of the market is that inter- and and intra-team communication trumps parsimony economically, in most cases.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Wdomburg]

The real win for me is JRuby. The Java ecosystem is at least as broad as perl, and generally better suited to enterprise applications. There are generally perl modules for everything, but they often perform far worse (e.g. Net::LDAP is probably an order of magnitude slower than UnboundID processing LDIF) or are just terrible code (e.g. Net::Sieve::Script which is a regex-based hack, rather than an actual language parser like jSieve).

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Ding! Ding! Ding! Maintenance costs exceed initial development costs by many times. It's amazing how this aspect still gets hugely ignored. The fact that Fad Langauge #276 might save you weeks in development is mostly irrelevant. What matters is how easy maintenance of said software is when Random Maintainer #37 has to fix bugs and add new features for years down the line. Customers also don't give a shit how much more "fun" the langauge was either. When they need fixes or new features they care about the turnaround time and cost not your enjoyment.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Ruby is nearly 20 years old. It already has failed to become mainstream.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly the same.
only in the attitude...

used to write DNS tools
I have seen DNS tools written using VB (shudder). Any language can be used for DNS if you can talk UDP and have a IP stack to back it up. I seriously doubt dig/bind/activedir are written in Ruby...

ported to run on the JVM
And clearly you have not heard of vb.net or c# or python or even simple assembler. Languages that are turing complete can be run in any other system that is turing complete. It is the basis of our question is NP=P and why we can create emulators.

and the DSL language chosen as the basis...
Dude calm down. You are now so into it you are making stuff up and trying to prove it true. Look Ruby is decent at what it does. But it is a 4g language and all the baggage that comes along with being that.

My point is your rabid attitude is like a vb6 dude from the late 90s. They were going to rule the world. Everyone was going to be a programmer. It is ubiquitous in how flexible it is. You can make bank... blah blah blah ... You sound like the pascal dudes before that and the ADA guys before them and the cobol/fortran guys before them. Languages come and go. My favorite framework is long since dead. But I do not go on and on about it. I probably could even find somewhere that still uses it. I however pick up the next one and move on.

The *only* language that seems to stick is C. Warts and all.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a whole lot of successful startups who are clearly insane.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

And Ruby is just as unmaintainable as the VB6 crap. *shudder*

Re: If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

RPG LE

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

How well does Ruby run in your browser?

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Trick question. Ruby doesn't run well anywhere.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Aighearach]

Shut the fuck up, Ruby shill.

What an excellent, well-thought-out rebuttal! I'm sure everybody will flock to adopt your analysis.

I could replace you with a Ruby bot in under 10 lines of code, and nobody would notice the difference.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Aighearach]

Embedded systems have mRuby, which is super-hot in robotics right now. It is a set of C libraries, you can pick and choose which parts of the language you want to build in, and it runs almost anywhere with 32bit registers and x (some small amount) RAM.

Ruby has real advantages in the way it combines Smalltalk object semantics with C/Perl style syntax. It is important to learn, even if you're not going to use it, because it is one of the big ideas in the industry over the past few decades. I got interested in Ruby in the late 90s when Larry Wall said, "if you want to write everything using OOP than Ruby is a better language than Perl." I did wait for English manuals, though.

And yes, a carpenter who is writing software should really consider Ruby because it is easy to learn and you can go a long ways with "baby Ruby" without having to learn a bunch of extra crap. The Principle of Least Surprise and related concepts are a great benefit to the casual user.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Aighearach]

Kernel hackers should have at least a few hours toying with all of the modern languages so that they understand how the OS is used by the applications that do whatever tasks the computers are there to do. Kernels aren't useful without applications. Haters gotta hate, but hate is no reason not to learn the basics of the industry you work in. Especially if you fancy yourself as having an important role of some sort.

Not all mathematicians will need to use all the techniques that are taught. But they still are expected to have learned them at some point, even if their job ends up not using some type of method.

You can't know what tool you need when you come across the situation the tool is for, unless you learn as least the basics of all the tools that are used in your area of work. If you've never used a screwdriver because you decided, without having used it, that hammers are better, then you'll still be using the hammer. How are you going to avoid "every problem looks like a nail" without learning more tools that you don't already know you have a use for?

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Lunix Nutcase]

Embedded systems have mRuby, which is super-hot in robotics right now.

[citation needed] I know tons of embedded programmers and not a single one uses Ruby in their work.

It is a set of C libraries, you can pick and choose which parts of the language you want to build in, and it runs almost anywhere with 32bit registers and x (some small amount) RAM.

So basically excluding a large part of the embedded market that runs on 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers with KB of RAM and ROM.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Desler]

There are plenty of better languages to learn over Ruby if people need to learn the "basics of the industry". Ruby is only marginally more popular than moribund languages like Delphi.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[perryizgr8]

The only language I have ever seen used in true embedded stuff is C. At max C++. Anything else is fringe, or not really embedded.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[perryizgr8]

Effective Java development is near impossible without an IDE managing background compilation for you. Code is fast as hell though.

Is this some sort of a joke? Java has everything going for it except the execution speed. Show me one program written in Java that runs at acceptable speed on average hardware. Hell, Visual Studio compiled C# runs faster on a Raspberry Pi than Java.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Aighearach]

There are plenty of better languages to learn over Ruby if people need to learn the "basics of the industry". Ruby is only marginally more popular than moribund languages like Delphi.

That's pretty derpy. Haters hate, but you might want to check your data source on that one. I doubt it is based on programmer demand.

But lets see, there is a linked article! Maybe it says something relevant. Oh, it talks about programmer pay, a realistic gauge of demand. Turns out RubyOnRails is at the top of the list.

You really, seriously are going to come out and claim that Pascal is almost as popular as Ruby? In 2014? That wasn't even true 10 years ago, but it was closer.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Aighearach]

strictly speaking, mRuby is just a framework for C. It is basically impossible to use unless you're already using C as your main language. You don't need to run the interpreter to use it, or to evaluate any Ruby code, you can use it entirely for the type system for example. It is like Lua. It is really useful to have in the bag for prototyping, and the end result is still C.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Aighearach]

Right, the very smallest stuff it is not realistic to add a lot of high level features to the language running on the hardware, you'd want the high level stuff to be code generators running on the development workstation. But where you have more complicated processing needs, for example inside factory robots, then mRuby is getting a lot of use. It was funded by Japanese heavy industry.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Lunix Nutcase]

Again [citation needed]. You claim doesn't match any of the embedded industry news I follow or any of the work any embedded software developer does. You're likely overexaggerating a miniscule niche market as the person above said.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Lunix Nutcase]

"Does that I know" that should be. To add, I also have a number of books on embedded programming (a number of them pretty recent) and all zero of them mention Ruby.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Desler]

Exactly. This guy lives in some sort of bizarro world Rubyist bubble. Sure, there is probably some guy's toy project to use Ruby in some sort of faux embedded environment, but that hardly matches what is done by the actual people writing the software.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Strictly speaking, it doesn't matter since next to no one doing embedded work uses that toy framework.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

cool strawman, bro

Re: If it's losing steam it's because

[Anonymous Coward]

Server side Java, sorry. Should have clarified.

The JVM's garbage collector and just in time compiler are the reasons. If you need confirmation, check the techempower cross language benchmarks. Java dominates.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[segedunum]

I think that's possibly the best advertisement for Ruby here, along with all the other derogatory comments about Ruby posted by some guy called 'Anonymous Coward'. He's really busy.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[devent]

I run a lot of apps that are in Java and they run with the same speed as any other app.
Eclipse, VisualParadigm, FreeMind, FreeCol, yEd, jedit, and my own written apps.

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[Aighearach]

You have heard of heavy manufacturing? It is a thing. It is not my thing. It is also not a toy.

It is who funded and participated in development. So if you think the Japanese heavy manufacturing industry is a bubble, yes, that is bizarro world indeed. :P

Re:If it's losing steam it's because

[sponse]

Java is slow on desktops but has really good performance on servers.
On servers you got plenty of ram and people to tune up the application after the installation. Once you start the application and after the warm up time Java is fast.

Python

[Art3x]

David Heinemeier Hansson was sick of PHP, found Ruby, and invented Rails in 2004. No mention is made of him toying with Python. I think that if he had found Python that he would have liked it just as much. Django had not come out though.

I guess that he did the best he could with what he had, but I wonder if he would he would have just switched from PHP to Django had he started five years later.

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

If DHH used Python instead of Ruby, then he'd probably get the same amount of respect that I give him now. Hint: 0

Fuck Ruby. Fuck Phython. Fuck interpreted languages. C for life!

Re:Python

[tomhath]

Every few years someone realizes they can query the database schema and generate CRUD forms. I never understood why Rails became popular, it was the same old approach with the same old inherent shortcomings - mostly that management thinks you have 80% of the application written in a couple of hours, when in fact you have almost nothing with any business value that a database IDE like PhpMyAdmin doesn't give you.

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people are easily impressed with "magic" stuff, even if the "magic" is packing a bunch of scripts together to generate shit behind the scenes.

Scaffolding was what made ROR popular on many conferences I went, despite scaffold being useless most of the time and generating unnecessary views and, as you say, nothing that phpmyadmin couldn't do. It also meant you could make a shitty prototype in 2 hours to show to your potential clients.

I have mixed feelings about Ruby, it's easy to use, and sometimes you can make some useful programs in a few lines to scratch your itch it's readable if you are an organized programmer. I do not like rails at all, I don't like the Perl "There is more than one way to do it" that impregnate most of ruby code I've seen. I also find a stupid tendency in rubyists to do one liners, like sacrificing code readability for geek pride was a good tradeoff.

On the other hand I feel more and more excited to code in Go lately, which is way simpler, readable and faster than Ruby code, it enforces many conventions upon you but not nearly as annoying ( to me at least) than Python for example.

Re:Python

[rasmusbr]

Nah, real programmers just wire analog components together until they get the behavior that they need.

Re:Python

[jbolden]

J2EE became popular because it answered the question in a reasonable way of how to handle state for web application development. Rails became popular because it offered a way to do 80% of what J2EE allowed at 20% of the development time and complexity.

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

RoR was never that popular in the real world. It was over-enthusiastically hyped mostly by people writing toy software for small companies no one ever heard of. The few big companies who decided to try it dumped it pretty quickly after attempting to use it and struggling futilely to fix its inherent shortcomings. Rubyists just can't let the hype train die because they'd be unemployable otherwise.

Re:Python

[VGPowerlord]

Of course, Java hasn't stood still, nor have the people that write libraries for it.

Hell, I want to say the Java + Spring + Hibernate stack even existed before RoR did.

Thanks to advances over the years, you can now write Spring applications using no XML. Short example (the longer example guide seems to have gone MIA on the Spring Guides site).

Although I'd hope you'd be using your web server/servlet container's database setup stuff (including connection pooling) rather than hard-coding it into the app.

Re:Python

[tigersha]

No, Java was very heavily influenced by RoR. Before DHH said "Screw Java" J2EE was a seriously bad, complex mess. After lots of people went to RoR because it is such a PITA to write J2Ee (I was one) a lot of simplyfying went into J2EE which improved it.

Rails never had 'steam'.

[Qbertino]

Rails never had 'steam'. (I supose you mean something else than that digi-distro-channel by Valve)

Rails was and is a fad - plain and simple.

Every haphazard PHP project runs circles around it - for the simple fact that deploying PHP is dead simple, whereas with Rails it's a major PITA. Rails was discovered and hijacked/promoted by the Java community - and while they were all happy and gleeful about the lightweight convention-over-configuration approach they didn't know until then - the Rails & Ruby community bloated Rails beyond repair big-time-Java-style with libs, extensions, mandatory deployment systems that only a very small minority really needs, etc. Rails ran into walls in the real world and the abysmal arrogance of its community scared n00bs away.

The truth is, nobody needs rails. PHP and its big frameworks are faster and easyer to develop for, both PHPs and Pythons communities are way more n00by friendly and for people who need something big, easy and scalable there's projects like Plone (Python) or Typo3 Neos (PHP) for massive non-trivial installments, each with hundreds of active developers to back them.

The only thing that Rails had going for it was a website that didn't look like shit - back in a time when most FOSS websites mostly *did* look like shit - and the brand-new concept of screencasts to show of scaffolding and code-generation. That has changed thankfully, throughout the FOSS community. Scaffolding - definitely not a first with Rails - is now well know as a concept and commonplace. And the FOSS projects are finally aware that marketing, including websites that don't suck, is important. That's the overall improvement that Rails brought along.

But right now Rails as a FW is way to bloated, unwieldy and buggy to be of any use for a web-project beyond enthusiasts fiddling with it. I have yet to get a Rails environment running on my laptop for local development. With PHP its download MAMP, XAMPP or "apt-get install mod-php" and start progging.

So, yeah, no steam, only hot air.
And, yes, from what I can tell, the hypes been over since about 2 years.

My 2 cents.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[xaxa]

Rails never had 'steam'. (I supose you mean something else than that digi-distro-channel by Valve)

A steam locomotive. When it runs out of steam, it stops. (Wording chosen for the pun with Rails.)

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rails never had 'steam'. (I supose you mean something else than that digi-distro-channel by Valve)

A steam locomotive. When it runs out of steam, it stops. (Wording chosen for the pun with Rails.)

Ruby on Rails: The bigger the train, the bigger the wreck.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look, another person who doesn't actually work in the industry.

"I have yet to get a Rails environment running on my laptop for local development"

You're kidding right? It literally comes running out of the box and includes it's own webserver. Are you fucking stupid?

"With PHP its download MAMP"

No professional PHP programmer does this. They either install the stack themselves, or use a virtual machine and install the stack themselves.

"Scaffolding - definitely not a first with Rails - is now well know as a concept and commonplace."

Do you honestly think generating a few controllers and models is the reason people pick a framework? Really?

"But right now Rails as a FW is way to bloated, unwieldy and buggy to be of any use for a web-project beyond enthusiasts fiddling with it."

Plenty of projects use Rails. Your statement smacks of ignorance.

"My 2 cents."

Contain 0 sesne. You're clueless, and it shows.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Anonymous Coward]

8/10
-1 for "n00by" and -1 for recommending plone and typo3 which aren't web frameworks but shit tier cms

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have yet to get a Rails environment running on my laptop for local development.

Install RVM. Now you can have thousands of versions of Ruby with isolated packages running on one machine at the same time without any configuration changes. I've been writing PHP code for 15 years professionally and until version 5.4 of PHP what I just described was nearly impossible with PHP. Until 5.3 it didn't even have namespaces man.

I do love some raw PHP for crazy fast one-off scrips, but PHP for frameworks is abysmally bad because of the core way the language works. Each request reprocesses / reloads EVERYTHING. In any language other than PHP, there is a boot process that preloads everything. APC helps with this but PHP + Frameworks are a baaaaaad combination.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[The Raven]

I agree that Rails is a fad. But touting PHP as better is... odd. PHP is a dismal language, with horrible coding practices and duplicate commands (some are bad, some are good, who knows which is which). Using a library, you have no idea what code they used... did they use the old string routine that's vulnerable to buffer overflows, or the new one? Why does PHP even KEEP the broken commands, it's insane!

Ruby is good (despite performance issues), PHP is bad. I'll take any framework built around Ruby over any framework built around PHP.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[maxwells daemon]

But right now Rails as a FW is way to bloated --> But right now Rails as a FW is way _too_ bloated

my german is Hogan's Heroes based. "to" might be a simple typo, but just in case. "too", in this case, is to an excessive degree. As opposed to: me, too, I think RoR is excessively bloated. Like a fish too long on the shore (simile). In the sun.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Aighearach]

Rails has been out for 10 years. You keep using this word "fad" but I'm not sure it means what you think it means.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right, but not in the way you think. RoR is definitely not a fad, since a fad implies much more popularity than Rails has ever had.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[HarrySquatter]

Disco and bell-bottoms were both around for more than 10 years. They are all still a widely-used examples of fads. Methinks you don't understand what fad means.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP is bad in the same sense that Visual Basic was bad. They both are tools that allow you to put something out there at insane speeds. Technically speaking they might not be all that structured but you cannot deny the value they have for RAD.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Anonymous Coward]

The penultimate achievement of disco culture: fusion of Disco and bell-bottoms into the Disco-bottom at Studio 54, circa 1978!

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have yet to get a Rails environment running on my laptop for local development.

You can't surely be serious.

• 1. Install rbenv
• 2. rbenv install 2.1.5
• 3. gem install rails
• 4. rails new shiny-app
• 5. cd shiny-app && rails server

If that's too difficult I suggest a change of career.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Aighearach]

fad
noun
1.
a temporary fashion, notion, manner of conduct, etc., especially one followed enthusiastically by a group.
Origin
1825-1835
1825-35; noun use of dial. fad to look after things, busy oneself with trifles, back formation from obsolete faddle to play with, fondle. See fiddle

or

fad /fæd/
noun (informal)
1.
an intense but short-lived fashion; craze
2.
a personal idiosyncrasy or whim

I'm honestly very surprised to find multiple people in the same thread who not only don't know the word "fad," but apparently can't even operate a dictionary. If it is not temporary, it is not a fad. Disco was a fad because it was temporarily very popular, and then went back to not being very popular, except as a funny thing from the past. Rails, OTOH, was quickly popular, and has remained steadily popular for reasons having nothing to do with a fashion, craze, or following. Rather, it is seen as a quality tool for building dynamic websites rapidly and with polished results.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[HarrySquatter]

Disco was "temporarily popular" in the mainstream from 73 to 79. So again methinks you don't understand what fad means.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Aighearach]

Disco was "temporarily popular" in the mainstream from 73 to 79. So again methinks you don't understand what fad means.

That doesn't even contradict me! lolololololol

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[ahabswhale]

If you can't get Rails up and running, I weep for you. I'm hardly a fanboy (and have never used it to build a real app) but it's pretty braindead simple.

Re:Rails never had 'steam'.

[Qbertino]

I agree that Rails is a fad. But touting PHP as better is... odd.

Never said PHP was good.
But PHP *is* better - in more ways than one. If anything, PHPs badness is its advantage.

Rails and the Ruby team try to do everthing right - that's why they get stuck in layer and layers of package management, mandatory deployment automation, to many options, crummy documentation and constant breakage, dependancy hell, etc.

It takes minutes to get to real work on the app layer in PHP, days in Rails/Ruby. I can download the newest Zip of Wordpress and have a site running in 30 minutes. Yes, WPs architecture is bizar and beyond sanity, its ERD is a crime against humanity, but it works! Same with Joomla, Drupal and the lot. ... Not seeing anything of that magnitude coming out of the Rails community, not in the past, not in the future.

Yet the PHP people had Frameworks up and running in no time. CakePHP is an official Rails clone in PHP - and by now way more stable and consistent. Symfony, Zend and Flow are all three Frameworks that tout the newest and bravest of programming paradigms and just as easy to deploy and set up as any old PHP WebCMS. Meantime Rails is still navel-gazing. I doubt it will maintain its critical mass. If anything JavaScript all-over (Client- and Serverside) is coming with Node.js. If anything, that will touple the PHP reign - allthough I'm not holding my breath on that one - for one, Node.js is callback hell for large non-trivial applications.

I had no idea

[ArhcAngel]

I wasn't aware that Steam was written in Ruby.

Some history on Rails and Django

[Qbertino]

David Heinemeier Hansson was sick of PHP, found Ruby, and invented Rails in 2004. No mention is made of him toying with Python. I think that if he had found Python that he would have liked it just as much. Django had not come out though.

I guess that he did the best he could with what he had, but I wonder if he would he would have just switched from PHP to Django had he started five years later.

The Rails crew knows the Django crew and vice-versa from the very beginning. They're basically drinking-buddies.
Rails simply was the favourite scripting language inside 37 Signals (DHHs favourite PL to be percise), so they developed their internal Basecamp Tool with it.
And built Rails as a foundation for that.

Basecamp became so popular with 37 Signals customers, they decided to turn it into a service.

Re:Some history on Rails and Django

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is, we need to destroy 37Signals to rid the world of this cancer of a framework and all its "developers" and supporters.

Re:Some history on Rails and Django

[Aighearach]

No, what he's saying is that Rails wasn't written to be a framework for others to use, it was written to solve the real problems that the consultancy that created had to solve for their clients. And it was such a huge success, they gave it away to the world to promote their consultancy business. Which was also successful.

That it has always been solving real problems first, and isn't born from ideology, might explain pretty much everything about its success.

Django won the web, Node trying to win apps

[mozumder]

It's ORM is much better than anything in Node, which is why so many content/e-commerce sites are using it.

Node is only good for apps, which is a much smaller market than content & e-commerce sites. But Node really doesn't have a chance against native apps, especially when its competing against something like Swift on iOS.

What killed Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Rails did not really take off because Ruby did not take off. Ruby did not make it because it lacks the libraries that Python and other languages have. For instance it does not have the numerical analysis tools Python has (NumPy and SciPy). The Ruby version are not complete or do not exist. Ruby has Rails, Rake, and is incredibly easy to read and learn, but being without having a complete tool box it just does not cut it.

Re:What killed Ruby

[Wdomburg]

It may not be the most popular option, but Ruby is hardly a marginal language. RedMonk has it tied for 6th with C++, PYPL has it at 10th, and TIOBE has it at 14th. It came off from the Rails high, but it remains steadily popular.

The ecosystem has actually got significantly better over the years, especially as Puppet, Chef, MCollective and others have driven popularity as an admin language, rather than a web language. But more importantly, JRuby pulls in the entire Java ecosystem, which actually puts it in a better position than perl or python, in my opinion. There is Jython, but that lags significantly behind C Python (current stable is 2.5 compatible, which was released eight years ago; their 2.7 release has been in beta for about 21 months) while JRuby offers Ruby 2.1 compatibility in their current stable release and will be putting out their release candidate for 2.2 around the same time as the Ruby 2.2 stable release.

Re:What killed Ruby

[MillerHighLife21]

jRuby totally changes the dynamic for Ruby, no question. It solves virtually every non-imaginary production problem that Ruby's historically had WHILE adding the entire Java ecosystem to the mix.

Python is very heavily tied to C. Ruby seems to live in both worlds much more successfully.

Re:What killed Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet even with JRuby being 13 years old next to no one cares about it. Your irrelevant toy software doesn't count.

Re:What killed Ruby

[H0p313ss]

RedMonk has it tied for 6th with C++, PYPL has it at 10th, and TIOBE has it at 14th. It came off from the Rails high, but it remains steadily popular.

That would be a usage of the word popular with which I was previously unfamiliar.

That makes it sound as popular as poking your eyes out with a tree branch.

Re:What killed Ruby

[Wdomburg]

Considering the proliferation of programming languages out there, holding a spot in the top ten is respectable. Certainly not tantamount to self-mutilation.

Re:What killed Ruby

[Wdomburg]

No one?

ahref=https://twitter.com/jruby/status/534471839620165632rel=url2html-15138https://twitter.com/jruby/stat...>

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[Bigbutt]

Yea, we're evaluating config management tools and have excluded puppet and chef specifically because it requires a ruby instance.

[John]

Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

I would _never_ agree to work for a business which chooses the wrong tool for the job because said tool is "cool". Either they use an appropriate language, of I choose which language to use.

Virtually all Ruby shops fit into that first statement - wrong tool for the job, but do it because it's "cool".

Yo, its 2014!

[Zecheus]

The internet boom, THE dot-com boom 'n' crash, 9/11 (2001!) and birth of DHS all predated (2014 - 10). Math (or history) is hard. Ruby On Rails originated in 2003. The crash of the global economy followed.

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[Zecheus]

RoR in 2005. See what you did to me!

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[jfbilodeau]

Ruby On Rails originated in 2003. The crash of the global economy followed.

So...RoR crashed the economy then?

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[Niris]

Original poster said "inside a span of 10 years", not "in the last 10 years." Reading comprehension is hard.

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[knightghost]

Makes sense, since RoR is for programmers that are afraid of databases. They just can't deal with real data.

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[Half-pint HAL]

Ruby On Rails originated in 2003. The crash of the global economy followed.

So...RoR crashed the economy then?

I told you guys that dynamic typing was unstable....

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[fibonacci8]

So it's also "inside a span of 100 billion years", and a vague statement at best.

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[Zecheus]

There is only one 10 year span with relevance to the context of this post: the 10 year span that ends now. Historians would care what the highest paid programming job is in 1978, or 2011. People planning a programming career, or evaluating opportunities TODAY won't care. Reading comprehension is hard, but contextual analysis is harder.

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[Aighearach]

I started using it in `04, so I doubt that.

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it's initial release was in Dec 2005 that is highly unlikely.

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[Anonymous Coward]

But no one mentioned 100 billions years.
"Inside a span of 10 years" was in reply to a comment wanting to know sustained salary over 10 years.

Reading comprehension really _is_ hard, isn't it?

Re:Yo, its 2014!

[toddestan]

December 2005 was the 1.0 release. It was around in 2004, but at that time it was still pretty obscure.

Re:THE FUCKING TAGLINE

[Anonymous Coward]

A better tagline:

Still better than reddit for now, so shut up and assimilate.

There. FTFY.

githut

[Noah Haders]

what is githut. this word is in the summary. why. does it have a meaning? is it like pizza hut? or jabba the hutt?

Re:githut

[Anonymous Coward]

JFGI, man. It's a page that shows what the most popular languages and frameworks are on GitHub.

Re:githut

[njahnke]

... or pizza the hutt?

Re:githut

[Noah Haders]

the Schwartz is with you!

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[Electrawn]

Wow. The core of Chef is Erlang which allows modules to load in ruby,perl, python or whatever you want. The client is in ruby.

Excluding the top tools on the market because of zealotry against the language? Wow.

Is it making place for proper, modular...

[Anonymous Coward]

...alternatives, like Lotus?

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[Anonymous Coward]

Very few distributions install ruby by default. It is not a good dependency to have.

Whats the alternative then?

[MrBandersnatch]

I still would find myself hard pressed to select a language and framework that would get a vanilla CRUD based site or backend up and running as quickly as one can with RoR.

Python/Django is heading there but I find Python to be less productive as a language and I've shot myself in the foot a few times due to whitespace issues (especially when refactoring). MS languages are a no-no until they bite the bullet and officially support *nix based system; Java ... shoot me; Scala .. shoot me twice! (and then once more for mercy), Go just doesn't have the productivity benefits, although I'd stand being convinced there; nodejs ... good in the early stages but I find that maintainability suffers as applications scale; PHP/Laravel ... well again, maybe, I've not really looked.

I actually do not like Rails I should also mention - rather than refine the framework it has become a bloated mixed bag of goodies much like the paradigms it replaced, so I would be genuinely interested in opinions on the alternatives.

Re:Whats the alternative then?

[Tablizer]

If you master its "different" framework, perhaps you are right. But the problem is that the learning curve is too high. A master swordsman can probably beat a generic cop with a gun in a urban environment. However, it takes a heck of a lot of training to reach that point. Cops with guns are cheaper and easier to find and train.

And you left out Ruby's a turd to begin with

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason why it's buggy and slow - it really is a TURD.

For example, look at the source code. See how it uses setjmp()/longjmp()? Yeah, that makes for easy-to-maintain code.

Now go read the man pages for setjmp()/longjmp(). Ruby misuses them - to the point where it only works because it has to be hacked like crazy in hardware-specific ways. Read this:

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/5244

Look how much effort had to be expended just so Ruby could be compiled with optimizations.

Re:And you left out Ruby's a turd to begin with

[Anonymous Coward]

Is TURD the RoR version of CRUD? It all makes sense now!!!

Re: Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby al

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not "zealotry" to avoid a horrible technology because it's horrible. It actually called "good judgment".

Rails never had 'steam'.

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir are an idiot.
Anyone running a simple curl command can get it running.
\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[Anonymous Coward]

Ruby is objectively shit. There is no zealotry.

Would you say...

[Anonymous Coward]

... that its growth plan has gone off the rails?

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[Bigbutt]

Not zealotry. I'm not a fan of having to install extra software such as Ruby or other agents on every server. If I can't manage every server with the tool, then I continue using what I do now or look for a tool that doesn't need an agent. Heck, security requirements make installing extra software a bear due to dependencies. I have to manually install and chase down the additional packages. We have quite a few older systems which don't support these agents, even cfengine. So having an agentless tool to do configuration management is the goal. I am considering Ansible but if it doesn't work, I'll continue to use my ssh based scripts.

[John]

"Steam" is only half the salary equation

[hey!]

Specifically: the demand curve half of the equation. The other half is the supply curve. A platform can have *no steam whatsoever*, but so few programmers that the salaries are reasonably high.

Consider Delphi programming. I see Delphi positions come up once in a blue moon -- it's not used much any longer. But those salaries run from $80K to $110K plus. Sometimes you see a Delphi position come up in the mid 40s, but I suspect they're government positions.

I've seen listings for COBOL or PoweBuilder programmers both in the $60K to $110K plus range. You can bet when a company offers $110K for a PowerBuilder programmer it's because it's having a hard time finding one.

Re:"Steam" is only half the salary equation

[phantomfive]

I see Delphi positions come up once in a blue moon -- it's not used much any longer. But those salaries run from $80K to $110K plus.

$110K doesn't seem like a good salary for a programmer to me, but in some regions maybe it is.

Re:"Steam" is only half the salary equation

[Anonymous Coward]

In what hugely expensive elite enclave in the world is 110kUSD not a good salary for making computer code? Out of touch much?

Re:"Steam" is only half the salary equation

[phantomfive]

In what hugely expensive elite enclave in the world is 110kUSD not a good salary for making computer code?

Silicon Valley

Re:"Steam" is only half the salary equation

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, you can't possibly think that's representative of the vast majority of programmers or programming jobs...

Re:"Steam" is only half the salary equation

[Anonymous Coward]

$110K seems like a good salary for a programmer to me, but in some regions maybe it isn't.

FTFY. Get over yourself.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to utilize slack:

https://code.google.com/p/slack/

All it requires is SSH/bash. It's very nice.

charles@knownelement.com if you need help setting it up.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[bmimatt]

Well, you do not "have to install extra software on every server", you can have Chef or Puppet or even Ansible do that for you. While you're sipping your coffee and watch it run :)

Perl 6

[Sez Zero]

Will be released in 2015... just sayin'.

Re:Perl 6

[Anonymous Coward]

Will be released in 2015... just sayin'.

Perl is perceived to be a "write only" language ie difficult to read, primarily because of the TIMTOWDTI design philosophy. It's hard to know what the best way to do something in Perl is. It presents many choices and many memes for the same task. This is the opposite of Python's One True Way, which is much easier for novices.

Whether Perl6 is actually any good or not is now irrelevant unfortunately. Perl has well and truly lost the perception battle; language fadism is driven by perceptions and fashion, not so much by reality. In the coding shop where I worked, you couldn't even mention Perl to most of the young coders without getting a superior snort of derision and a subsequent gush about Python, Go, or some Lispy thing. This is a pity since I used to enjoy Perl5.

Re:THE FUCKING TAGLINE

[tehlinux]

>for now

I don't see reddit improving in quality any time soon (not that that invalidates your comment)

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[Aighearach]

Yeah, but using tools to that level requires reading manuals, and finding out what the features are before you decide if you hate it or not. It is so much simpler to just learn one way of doing things, and then muddle through with it forever, and install crap on servers by hand. Sure, it takes more work and doesn't scale, but it doesn't require more than one learning cycle per 3 decades. So there will always be a contingent that promote this way, and try to find ways of making themselves sound like Very Serious People.

I guess you could say...

[zeroryoko1974]

*puts on sunglasses* It's gone off the rails

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[Anonymous Coward]

*Perl

not short lived enought fad

[sdinfoserv]

The true index of programming languages, Tiobe, ranks Ruby at 14 and going down. If you're a ruby dev and making that kind of coin... bravo, stash it as your days are numbered. If you're looking for a new language to learn, look else where. I've been a php dev and found attempting to use Ruby an unpractical PITA. It just sucked.

Re:not short lived enought fad

[Anonymous Coward]

On Tiobe it was the Language hall of fame winner in 2006, and now in 2014 you're saying it is crap?
That doesn't say much for TIOBE's rankings and awards, does it?

Looks fabricated

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the links the article cites as it's source even mention Ruby. Seems like a desperate attempt to promote Ruby.

Re:Looks fabricated

[Desler]

Ruby needs all the help it can get. 19 years later and it's only marginally more popular than Delphi. And that language has been moribund for around a decade.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[ArsonSmith]

The chef server is in Erlang, of course the chef server doesn't do very much but auth hosts and server files. the client does pretty much everything.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[ArsonSmith]

It actually packages it's own embedded ruby instance, and if you excluding ruby and by extension Vagrant you really are missing out.

Everyone hates everything

[Anonymous Coward]

What you just described is true for any developer who calls him/herself a "${LANGUAGE}ist", or chains their identity to a language or framework. "PHP developers" are nightmarish. I've met "Java specialists" who produce absolutely incomprehensible shit, shit that's in some cases substantially worse than even average "Ruby developers". Successful developers evaluate and select tools to fit the problem they're trying to solve.

RoR never had Steam.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ruby on rails never had steam. Its simply not a skill used in the tech area unless you are around other RoR people; then its a buzzword and a social contract that you know it and use it. But outside of that, nothing has ever been created in RoR that is of any lasting value to the world, and nobody wants to hire you if you add it to your resume. i know this because I am an out of work developer who would gladly code in RoR all day despite how slow and buggy it is, but am currently without a job of any kind, and have been actively told by recruiters to remove the rails experience as it s"just not market competitive like it used to be" to have on a resume right now.

Rails is still very strong in job listings

[Anonymous Coward]

If you compare Rails with other web frameworks by job listing you'll find it is still out in front. Indeed.co.uk currently lists 230 Rails job titles in London, compared with 56 Symfony2, 40 Zend, 15 Laravel and 10 Django. Comparing Rails with PHP isn't a valid comparison IMHO as it's not a framework.

Re:Rails is still very strong in job listings

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction - the Django score was 129 when including Python in the job title. Still well below Rails, though.

Re:Rails is decaying, but Chef is keeping Ruby ali

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, did that point go right over your head or what?

You ever sit down at somebody else's computer and wonder how it got clogged with so much junk? maybe every stinking application required "only" this other framework or service too. You see this often with programmers who can't or won't do anything themselves. It's like those webpages that pull in 5MB of JS from 20 different servers just to load a fucking page with pictures of their cat.

hey genius...

[Anonymous Coward]

....you ARE aware that MS recently open sourced the .NET platform, right? And mono has been around for a while also.