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?

[Lunix Nutcase]

That's never fazed an HR department.

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.

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.