Declining was refering to the number of users, jobs, new projects and so on.
I agree that Rails today is a mature platform and very good at what it does: server-side rendered web applications with a relational database backend.
Re:Demand for Ruby on Rails is Still Huge
by RangerScience on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @11:42AM
(#17356408)
There's increasingly nice out-of-the-box support in Rails for React. Last time I set it up it wasn't trivial, but it wasn't a bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Rails 6 had it extremely baked in.
That's fair! And I'll concede that I actually don't know anyone outside of my own working group (we had standardized on Rails), and the people that I actually met at the annual Rails Conference, who are still talking about using Rails.
Otherwise, the most prolific programmers I know personally that used Rails, have all moved onto other platforms at new jobs or for their new development projects. Mostly Go, modern JS frameworks (many of them), Python, and Kotlin.
Some things get better with age. There's an advantage too, not being on the brand-spanking latest version of something – you get to let everyone else filter out the crap before it winds up in your production environments.
A few examples from recent Rails releases,
(1) Turbolinks is one thing that was widely regarded as absolute crap when it was released, but now I think it's a pretty non-controversial way for Rails developers to give their users a single-page experience without necessarily diving headfirst into JavaScript.
(2) If you rebuilt all of your Rails 5 apps to use the shiny new Encrypted Secrets in 5.1, ... surprise! 5.2 deprecates secrets in favor of the newer Encrypted Credentials feature.
I'm not saying there aren't good ideas in newer frameworks, but how many mature frameworks are still in active development? (Make a list) ... and how many of those would you actually like to use?
Though they may be more popular, I'm personally not seeing lots of people rallying behind Java and .NET, or making outrageous claims like that those platforms prioritize developer happiness. Rails developers like using rails.