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