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

Is Ruby's decline in popularity permanent?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is Ruby?

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

[LostMyBeaver]

Library clutter and corporate dependence generally decides the fate of a programming language.

C exists for the "I'll write everything myself crowd" and after nearly 50 years, C is still very popular because it's a very primitive language that allows programmers to be primatives. Consider the Linux kernel and Gnome which are probably the two biggest C projects ever. They don't have common collection types and while glib implements some mediocre standards collection types, very often in C, you spend 3/4 of your time just writing endless code to add items to lists or not. In the Linux kernel, the collection types are truly terrible... but really fast. C is a purest language in the sense of "I'd write it all in assembler, but I haven't figured out how to handle cross architecture there yet". C is probably the most indispensable language ever as it's the underlying foundation of computing. Though, we're making smart shifts slowly away from it. It's the new assembler in the sense that languages like Rust and Go are offering all the love of C with some run down features common in modern languages.

C++ would have suffered a death by now if it weren't for Qt coming along and setting a standard for how to program in C++. Even now, it's getting more and more difficult to use C++ as the language lacks direction. Half the people want it to compete with C and the other half wants it to compete with C# or Java. Also consider that multiple mega-billion dollar companies have banked their entire existence on C++. Rust looks like it will edge away a little on C++. Of course, much of that will be dependent on the quality of the standard libraries.

Java has a committee of elders (really, they're getting old now) that rule the library infrastructure of Java with an iron fist. As such, writing large scale projects with it makes sense. Java is the new COBOL. Billions or trillions of lines of business critical code are written in it. It's not the best language for anything in particular but it wears many hats. But Java doesn't gain its strength from being a language, it gains it from being a library and runtime.

Javascript is actually probably going to be one of the first languages to die... and quickly. For example, already people are leaving it for TypeScript... because JavaScript is not dependable and never has been. Now that there is an accepted paradigm for bridging other languages into the DOM, it is clear that it's no longer necessary to write in Javascript directly. There's always been so many issues with compatibility from version to version and implementation of Javascript that it always made sense to have a language that compiles into Javascript rather than using it directly. Now with WebAssembly, there's a lot more about to happen as languages begin to target WebAssembly as their back end... and Javascript as a fallback. WebAssembly is still missing a great way to manage memory, but it still looks REALLY promising.

C# is a controlled language and is easy. And it gets a lot of great new features without overwhelming the programmers with them. You can be a newb scripter or a seasoned veteran programmer and C# probably can work for just about anything you want to write. It also is the only universal programming language at this time (Javascript might count too but doesn't compile native... though this might not matter anymore) as it supports pretty much every major platform today. It also looks like there's some really good legitimate projects to make a real end-to-end cross platform solution for C# as well, especially with Xamarin,forms and XAML to HTML5, There are some real struggles at this point in time with C# because Microsoft is spreading in every direction trying to make a solution that will work for everyone while still remaining polished. .NET Core 2 and ASP.NET Core 2 look REALLY REALLY promising but there will still be work to do. But with C# addresses everything from Web to OS to Docker all in a single solution format which makes it really nice. Oh... and there's the who

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.

Python Won.

[0100010001010011]

It's pretty clear that Python's going to come out on top of the GenY/Millenial coding club. Ruby got a quick lead making Web 2.0 development easy but Python hit critical mass just by the number of available packages. Numpy, Matplotlib, etc. "How to ___ with Python" nearly always turns up a result.

And peers: No, just like COBOL and FORTRAN, C and your current $favorite_language isn't ever going to go away. I still do a lot of C, Matlab and Simulink at work. But when I have the opportunity Python is just faster due to the shear number of packages that already exist.

Re:Is Ruby's Decline In Popularity Permanent?

[Aighearach]

Yes.

The web fad moved on. They're never coming back. And good riddance.

Ruby will continue to grow in popularity for other types of uses.