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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.
Just wondering what the new darling programing language is.
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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.
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.
It's called a fad.
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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
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Ruby On Rails originated in 2003. The crash of the global economy followed.
So...RoR crashed the economy then?
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
Basically the above is: http://www.randomhacks.net/200...
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....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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).
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.
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.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
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.
*puts on sunglasses* It's gone off the rails