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.

Comments

Fad languages don't live long

[KiloByte]

Meanwhile, we grown-ups use Perl and C and laugh at the demise of this week's hipster language.

Now get off my lawn.

Re: Fad languages don't live long

[willy_me]

And PHP. With the release of the PHP 7, it's now faster in some cases than python.

Like a race between a snail and a tortoise...

If one is going to tout the virtues of these languages - do not use speed. Their strengths are elsewhere.

Re:Fad languages don't live long

[Kjella]

Javascript is actually probably going to be one of the first languages to die... and quickly.

Hahahaha no. Javascript is to the web what Java is to the enterprise, there's tons and tons of code and libraries written for it that needs to be maintained and improved, full rewrites rarely happen, rarely succeed and take forever. Other languages that compile down to Javascript won't be a threat any more than Rust and Go replacing C. Even if WebAssembly takes off it's 20 years late to become the standard exchange format, as long as you must have Javascript fallbacks for everything why would you bother unless your site is performance sensitive? You could support just JS or JS+WebAssembly, seems like an easy choice for me. Java applets, Flash, plug-ins in general - Javascript has been slaying all the competition. Even if WebAssembly takes off, is there any reason to think it'll be more than inline ASM for performance critical parts? I think it's just a niche for performance optimization, not a general replacement.