this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
56 points (98.3% liked)

Asklemmy

43993 readers
1609 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I just found out about The Odin Project, a self-paced online course to learn full stack web development. There are two paths: one is Ruby on Rails and the other is full JavaScript and nodejs. I am leaning more towards Ruby but I wanted to get some more opinions from folks in the field.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ruby is used in some large, older existing projects (e.g. GitLab, Redmine, Puppet) but my impression is that a lot of them do not have very much active development of the Ruby parts going on any more.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am seriously curious here: Why has popularity of Ruby declined?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably a few reasons for this. I’m not a ruby dev so take this with a grain of salt.

Ruby doesn’t have a lot to offer beyond languages like Python or Go without its companion web development framework Rails. Ruby on Rails was good for its time (~2012 -> 2015 era was peak), but there are more mature, stable, and widely adopted frameworks available in other languages. RoR touted speed to develop as a feature, but you can do things plenty fast with the aforementioned languages too. On the flip side, rails apps are notoriously slow to boot. I think this became a problem with cloud native infrastructure. For example, Kubernetes likes to spin up services very quickly, and can be painful to work with if that’s not an option (experienced this with Java apps too for that matter). As self hosting on bare metal went by the wayside, so too did interest in developing new apps on rails, imho.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Interesting! Thank you for the perspective. I am seeing a trend of smaller businesses that are bringing services back on premises and self-hosting but I have no interest in working for a small business. I've been there, done that, and it was hell.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, which makes Ruby one of those languages like COBOL, you can make a lot of money if you're in that world, but I wouldn't ever recommend that someone should try and join that world, it's going to be too hard to get in to and it might not stick around for long. I know some people that make a lot of money working in Ruby, but that doesn't mean that anyone can, unlike javascript which will be valuable anywhere