Andrew Kane seems to be one of the most productive Ruby developers out there - he has a ton of open-source gems that solve real-world problems: https://github.com/ankane

He's done a lot of the hard-work for creating the tooling in the first place - the community can step in from here.

Indeed he is. Blazer is my favourite reporting/dashboards tool by quite a distance.

Blazer, groupddate, lockbox, the list is endless. Grateful for folks like him in the community.

But will the community step in? I doubt it since Ruby gem output has dropped dramatically in the last couple of years. See modulecounts.com where Python output is about 10 times that of Ruby. That's the difference with the exponential growth of Python where you have the Python Foundation backing everything.

It's definitely a good point, I myself have noticed production software in Ruby losing favour over the past 5 years. I'm not sure for the reasons on it as I no longer build greenfield apps for companies so don't have those direct conversations, but I still use Rails in my own personal projects and for our current SaaS.

After the Ruby devops wave lost its momentum to Python and Go Ruby was left looking like a one-trick pony. The rise of microservices and API gateways also fits the lightweight Node.js async model better than Ruby's memory-heavy monolithic approach.

Update - daily output of modules: Python/190, Ruby/12.

What community? The web development space has moved on to javascript and friends. Ruby was also big in the security community for a while, but almost everything new is in Python. I actually checked the comments on this post to see if there was some new big push for Ruby I was missing.

Hotwire/Stimulus hasn't reversed Ruby's decline, as far as I can tell. Nor have the promised performance improvements in Ruby 3 so Ruby's downward slide looks likely to continue. Revivals are a rare thing in programming language adoption.

Yea. He has been a prolific contributor to the Ruby ecosystem. Inspiring work!

This follow up was published in September, 2020: https://ankane.org/more-ml-gems

With a total amount of 31 gems published within a year and this person having a lot more published libraries outside the ML space, how much time is available per gem for things like continued development, regular updates to new ruby versions and/or bug fixing? I can't help but think that having so many gems becomes unsustainable rather soon.