I am trying to find a place in the industry - again, starting from RoR. I absolutely love Ruby. And all this talk of "Ruby dying" makes me feel sad. The rational thing to do is to move on, and learn something popular, like node.js but the more I see Ruby in action, I just can't pull myself away from it.

I had managed to get a job as a Java developer a long time ago, but at that time all I could do was barely write toy apps in Java and I had no exposure to stuff like design patterns. The whole experience left me in a bad place. Now after all these years, Ruby feels like a breath of fresh air, and the texts that I have come across on the subject - Design Patterns in Ruby, Practical OOD in Ruby, Ruby under a Microscope etc. have increased my interest in the language.

But more and more frequent articles on Ruby's decline are pretty disheartening.

Ruby's future may actually not be Ruby itself. Probably the major problem with Ruby is its performance, which is slow even compared to other interpreted languages. While I'm not sure it is really production ready yet, Crystal is very interesting -- it's a native compiled statically typed language that nevertheless feels very much like Ruby. Check it out if you haven't.

I saw Tenderlove's interview on SE Radio, about Ruby internals. He seemed optimistic, but also because he's been working on a performance related project for the past few years now. Anyway, I'm hopeful.

It’s faster than python. And crystal is often faster than go.