Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.
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.
Tried Pipedot and SoylentNews?
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.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
You don't. JavaScript is still only picked out of idiocy, ignorance, or a mix of the two.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.