by shevy-java | 2026-03-12 14:41:26+00:00
> got Claude to generate the rest with some mockups of common screens and components.

And AI is doing the rest. The path to exctinction.

Does Claude make "scripting" languages obsolete? I mean that knowledge becomes less useful if AI autogenerates everything.

> This can be something simple like caching for a specific time period:

<% cache "time_based", expires_in: 5.minutes do %>
<!-- content goes here -->
<% end %>

I absolutely hate ERB. It is strange that it is such an integral part of rails.

I abandoned PHP for many reasons but one was the spaghetti problem.
Rail has the same spaghetti problem, though ruby is prettier than
PHP. Still, that spaghetti design is just awful.

> This is why services like Heroku and Pivotal Cloud Foundry thrived back then

Heroku is also in the process of dying. There were some recent discussions
about it on reddit as to why.

> While the Stack Overflow survey isn’t necessarily an accurate barometer of developer opinion, the positions of Ruby and Rails do show it’s fallen from grace in recent times.

It's not just SO though. TIOBE, despite being crap, also shows a similar trend. And if you research things, you notice many people moved on from ruby, for many reasons - often work-related.

The numbers are all there though. Now people either believe the numbers - or they write fake analysis such as this here: https://medium.com/railsfactory/ruby-is-not-dying-its-aging-...

> Anecdotally, I find a lot of documentation or guides that haven’t been updated for several years and the same goes for a lot of gems, plugins and other projects.

Yup. A dying ecosystem. I stopped using rubygems.org myself after Marty pushed the ecosystem into shopify's corporate pet project. 100.000 downloads and then your project is hijacked? Or the new shiny corporate rules? Nah. Go to corporate land and leave us alone, Marty. RubyCentral most definitely does NOT represent "the community". The original guys who wrote rubygems - now these were community folks, not some corporate ponicorns. Sadly when money is tight, bad things happen, and the ruby ecosystem showed this beautifully. Kind of bad too because it means money wins over community; but this is a chicken-egg problem, because how to grow a community if the trend goes downwards, for whatever the reason(s)?

> And I find that most gems follow a similar downward trend of activity.

Yup - but this is also old, even before RubyCentral transitioned into CorporationCentral. Ruby folks left ruby, years ago already. The people I knew from, say, 2005 to 2012 or so, also from IRC - some still use ruby, but most moved on to other things (also for financial reasons usually).

> Rails on the other hand actually seems to be picking up steam and has been remarkably consistent since the big “boom” of Rails 3.0 in 2010

Nope. Rails is also dying. It does not have the same 1:1 problem as ruby has, but
the decline is 100% there too.

> Rails is a rare example of an OSS project that’s grown into its release cadence rather than burning out.

Not really. Ignore the promo. Look at the facts. Rails has been hurting too (which makes DHH laughing about when RubyCentral mass-purges developers both evil and silly, because that hurts the whole ruby ecosystem too - what was shopify thinking here?).

> Whether it can still find an audience amongst new developers is an open question

Yeah that is the question. Unfortunately the answer is there: new developers won't use ruby for the most part. AI also competes here now.

2026 is not like 2006, sorry folks.

> I probably could eventually build things almost as fast in another language or framework, but I doubt I’d be smiling as much while I did so.

Well, I used perl, php, python (still use python too). Ruby is more efficient for my brain though. And I disagree that I could be as fast as in another language. I simply have fewer barriers when writing ruby for the most part. Less restrictions. I don't think anyone thinks ruby itself is a bad language at all. We need to keep the discussions separate.

Pretty good comment from Mark Dastmalchi-Round by the way. Well-written, tons of details, opinions - even if I may disagree with some points, the overall quality of his blog entry is very good. We should give him very good marks for the blog - even more so as it is not on medium.com. I hate medium.com (and the link above, is to medium.com ... why did I link it ...)