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Is Ruby's Decline In Popularity Permanent? (computerworld.com.au)
An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld:
Ruby has had a reputation as a user-friendly language for building web applications. But its slippage in this month's RedMonk Programming Language Rankings has raised questions about where exactly the language stands among developers these days. The twice-yearly RedMonk index ranked Ruby at eighth, the lowest position ever for the language. "Swift and now Kotlin are the obvious choices for native mobile development. Go, Rust, and others are clearer modern choices for infrastructure," said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. "The web, meanwhile, where Ruby really made its mark with Rails, is now an aggressively competitive and crowded field." Although O'Grady noted that Ruby remains "tremendously popular," participants on sites such as Hacker News and Quora have increasingly questioned whether Ruby is dying. In the Redmonk rankings, Ruby peaked at fourth place in 2013, reinforcing the perception it is in decline, if a slow one.
Meanwhile, we grown-ups use Perl and C and laugh at the demise of this week's hipster language.
Now get off my lawn.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Try CPAN. How to ___ with perl has been around longer and is far better. I find python craps up my namespace and scope too easily, but then I've not used it anywhere near as much as the more developed perl. And you can't paste a long program into a single line edit box as the indentation matters. Whitespace as a statement delimiter is stupid, and it being popular just means that there are a lot of stupid people. Ditto indentation. I'd rather have the choice.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Perl won the GenX popularity contest a long time ago. No one is coming after your Perl, don't worry. You can use it until the day you die.
You'll be able to recruit Perl developers long after your death just like they do for COBOL and FORTRAN.
And when Millennials get older hey'll have as many complaints about what ever the next gen programming language is and why Python is the best thing ever. Slashdot will be running stories about "Perl developer shortages" and life will go on.
You're doing the technological equivalent of arguing over what hammer is better. No one is going to take away your blacksmith's anvil or coarse hammers. I just prefer something else.
. I'd rather have the choice.
I'd rather just learn how to do both and teach my brain how to switch depending on what I'm developing. It's about as different as learning to speak another language and then doing so. Arguing than Spanish's word order is better than German's isn't going to help you solve any problems nor is screaming at the Germans in Spanish to "just learn Spanish".
Today I'll work in Python, tomorrow Bash, the rest of the week Matlab. Occasionally PHP, C, VBA, JavaScript and a few others. Same reason I have to deal with Git, SVN, and ClearCase. In the corporate wold it's easier to learn to do something new than change the momentum of an entire corporation.
And you can't paste a long program into a single line edit box as the indentation matters.
I take that time to proof read and learn the language and customize the example I copy and pasted for my application.
Whitespace as a statement delimiter is stupid, and it being popular just means that there are a lot of stupid people.
_______ is stupid, and it being popular just means that there are a lot of stupid people.
Somewhere there's an old assembly developer saying something very similar about the C developers. And the C developers about the Perl, and Perl about Python, Python about what ever comes next.
It's a language, not a religion.