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."
I spend more of my time writing javascript/coffeescript than Ruby.
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.
I swear I did not think I would live to see the time where JavaScript was picked for performance...
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
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.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.