by shevy-java | 2026-03-12 14:41:14+00:00
> Rails seems to have pretty much fallen out of favour, coming in at #20 underneath the bulk of top-10 JavaScript and ASP.NET frameworks

It's not just Rails. Ruby is dying. And has been for quite some years now.

The strangest things are people writing blog entries claiming the opposite. Like "ruby ages like fine wine". No, that is incorrect - it is dying. I have been using Ruby since about 2004 or 2005. I still use it just about daily. I started before Rails and couldn't care any less about Rails; sadly the ecosystem is infiltrated by corporations such as shopify and others. You can see how they took over RubyCentral effectively (and if they insinuate otherwise - nope, I am not an idiot. I see the pattern. I notice what is happening. You call a black cat a green frog and I call bullshit. It's a black cat. See RubyCentral running amok already before they mass-purged developers, but that's another story - let's go back to ruby, and rails.)

> And Ruby itself is nowhere near the top 10 languages, sitting just underneath Lua and freaking Assembly language in terms of popularity!

Yup. Ruby is dying. It is following perl.

Now, defining "dying" is hard because you still have an active community, even outside of the train wrek that is rails (anyone still caring what random crap DHH writes on his blog? I've noticed fewer people care about the garbage he publishes, other than making fun when shopify damages the ecosystem - oh wait, he sits on the board of shopify. Did I already point out how much damage shopify causes here?).

> But I’m a stubborn bastard, and if I find a technology I like, I’ll stick with it particularly for projects where I don’t have to care about what anyone else is using or what the latest trend is.

On this part I agree. Ruby as a language is very well designed. It is a great language. I don't think anyone really objects to this, so the criticism has to be split - some criticism is valid, some is not. As a language ruby is well designed.

Nonetheless it is dying too. That is also a factual statement. Anyone claiming the opposite is wrong. At the least this is the case right now, and has been in the last some years, to varying extent.

> realised Ruby was “a better Perl than Perl”.

Also true. Ruby is the better perl. But I actually call Ruby syntactic sugar over C, because this is actually what Ruby is, if you think it through. My use cases are mostly helper-scripts, tons of that, over whatever I do in general. Literally everything computer-related. That includes use cases for the world wide web. All my needs here are covered by Ruby - but not by rails. I don't need rails.

Sadly, ruby also has a second problem: documentation. The documentation is crap in general. Look at rack. Opal. WebAssembly for Ruby. That documentation is a joke. An insult. Even sinatra, though better documented than these, has a bad documentation for the most part. There are some exceptions; for instance, hexapdf is well documented, and Jeremy's projects are also well-documented. So I am not saying everything is poorly documented. But for a language that once claimed it wants to compete against python ... sorry, documentation-wise this is still an epic failure point. In some ways ruby actually deserves to follow the path to extinction like perl did, merely because it failed to adjust, adapt and really improve. Yes, there is some internal improvement, but in many ways ruby failed to solve the problems people critisized it for, for many years. And now catching up is SUPER hard. I don't think it can happen anymore. I thought it was possible 10 years ago, but the last 5 years made it clear that ruby is towards extinction. It still does not change me using it, since ruby covers my use cases, but anyone thinking there will be an influx of new young folk driving ruby forward, is just worshipping an illusion here.

> There’s just this minimal translation required between what I’m thinking and what I type.

That's true. Ruby is kind of transitioning your thoughts into code.

> Sure, I can knock things together in Python, Go, or whatever the flavour of the month is, but I always feel on some level like I’m fighting the language rather than working with it.

Kind of, though python works fairly well too.

> And of course there was the welcoming, quirky “outsider” community feel with characters like Why the Lucky Stiff and their legendary Poignant Guide To Ruby.

Well - _why ragequit when someone doxxed him. But even aside from this, I found
the poignant guide super-confusing. It was art, but I prefer less confusion
myself. Still, _why is gone from the ruby ecosystem. Supposedly he is still doing
computer-related stuff in reallife but he is no longer really affiliated with
ruby as such. Did I already point out that ruby is dying?

> it’s just so nice being able to write things like

unless date <= 3.days.from_now

I don't doubt that rails is useful, but code like that sucks. Rails
also came up with HashWithIndifferentAccess. This simply shows a lack
of UNDERSTANDING. They pushed the DSL madness way too far. Yes, I get
it, "I don't want to care if we have a string or a symbol" - easier
access. But it is the wrong THOUGHT process here. And just the name
itself ... HashWithIndifferentAccess versus Hash. Sorry rails guys -
you were not good designers in a general sense of the word. The DSL
may work; the DSL may be useful, but language or API designers? Nope,
sorry. It's awful.

if upload_size > 2.megabytes

I don't like this either, but I have less reservation here than compared
to using numbers for time/date. It's cool that ruby is flexible to allow
this, but I still think it is the wrong THOUGHT process.