Tiobe and Stack Overflow rankings don't mean much. Look how popular Tiobe ranks VB due to Excel macros, or SO ranks Bash and PowerShell very highly simply because people ask a lot of questions about it.

I cited the three most popular rankings. I don't know what else to do here.

My own personal experience as a CTO and startup investor: I haven't seen Ruby (or even met someone whose primary language is Ruby) in a long time.

I think it had a moment ~10 years ago when a lot of people started companies using Rails. Some of them still use it, most of them just went out of business.

It hasn't been big since then. It seemed to only ever have become popular in a fairly limited bubble of startups, especially in Silicon Valley.

I mean, it's not Java, C#, Go or JS. It never was that big.

But some pretty successful startups used it and some successful companies today use it. It's been a tool used to spawn quite a few billion+ dollar companies.

I agree, but we're talking about whether a language is popular, aren't we?

Ruby is a fine language that some people have ridden to great success. It is still a fairly niche language.

We're on a popular website written in Arc -- likely the only website written in Arc. Popularity isn't everything and I'm not suggesting it is.

What does popular mean? Used by X% of people or used by X people?

Ruby developers is small in % but rather large as an absolute number.

Popular as in industry usage? Which is comparatively very small.

Smt88 is correct in that it is increasingly a niche. Churn rate is greater than retention rate. Junior Developers cant find jobs with Ruby and Rails, and they switch to others that do find them jobs. Companies only want to hire experience Ruby Rails developers but some of them moved on. It is a vicious cycle.

The point is even if Reddit was written in Arc, it has no bearing on Arc's industry status. It needs to be in a self sustainable ecosystem.

Juniors have a hard time getting jobs period, I don't think it has anything to do with Ruby.

Honestly, is Go as big as those three other languages?

Not yet, but it's now in the category of "You won't get fired for picking X". It's seen as enterprise-y and 'safe' and yes, is definitely quite used.

The fact it's used internally at Google and MS alone means it's got traction. I'm willing to bet lots of enterprise shops are using it for things, even if it's not #1.

The important question is would you have enough choices in Job Hunting if all you know is Go. And Go seems to be close to if not already a self sustainable status.

>or SO ranks Bash and PowerShell very highly simply because people ask a lot of questions about it.

Isn't the Stack Overflow one done by a survey, not just by analyzing the questions?

You're right, although doesn't really change my premise. I use Bash everyday, even though I have never tried learning it, don't really care about it, etc...

I really don't think Bash and Powershell are more popular for actual development than C++ and Go respectively. People just use them because they're there... Making the rankings a lot less meaningful.

>I really don't think Bash and Powershell are more popular for actual development than C++ and Go respectively.

I'd be willing to bet money that Bash is way, way more popular in development than Go.

If you mean popular as in "many people are using it", probably.

If you mean popular as in "many people like using it", I would question your (and their) sanity.

> If you mean popular as in "many people like using it", I would question your (and their) sanity.

According to Stack Overflow's survey[1], people enjoy Bash/Shell more than they enjoy Ruby.

I personally hate both Ruby and Bash, so I assume my sanity is beyond question.

1. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-loved-dr...

Again though, you have to qualify that.

> in development

This can be taken a few ways. I don't use Go, but I interact with Bash. So you're right in a sense.

I'd also never write a web-app in bash, nor a non-trivial program, nor anything that isn't a shell script. So is it really meaningful when people are looking for a language to write a GUI app, web app, mobile app or game in?

Broadly agree but I have to say I’m quite happy with where Ruby has settled now.

It’s not going to vanish anytime soon and the Ruby team continue to push improvements.

Unlike Python the ecosystem hasn’t become so large that it’s become impossible to keep track of.

It’s likely to remain my go to language for small projects in large part because writing Ruby is just fun!

Ok the Tiobe => Fortran is complete horse shit and we all know it. Fortan and Perl are both more popular than Go in that ranking I mean come on. But sure I agree Ruby is a nichey language, usage-wise about the same as Swift/Scala or maybe even Go. Somewhere in the top 10-15 I'd guess. If you look at web backend languages (e.g remove C/Visual Basic/C++) Ruby is probably top 10.

Fortran is used a lot in science and engineering. My ex was an evolutionary biologist and used it, as did everyone in her department.

What for? I know nothing about it but why not Python? Still haven't heard of anyone using it where I live.

Here are a few answers:

https://www.quora.com/When-do-I-use-FORTRAN-over-Python-and-...