The language is less important than the supporting tooling. IMHO we are just now, a decade later, seeing frameworks crop up in node that look anything like the out of the box usefulness that was the rails and django apps I was first exposed to. My honest opinion from several startups is that most sub ten year vets just don’t know that stuff existed already and / or just how much you can ask of your tech stack. I generally agree with your point though.

100% this. I've always said that the ecosystem, the tooling, the editor support, the libraries, the frameworks and the availability of people to hire are far more important than the language. For example it irks me when people say they like react because jsx or Vue because templates...that's the smallest of the reasons to choose one or another!!!

Same thing with Rails/Laravel/etc...people don't choose it because PHP or because Ruby , etc...the language doesn't matter at all, the tooling does matter it all.

Paul Graham, founder of YC would disagree. He claimed Common Lisp was the secret weapon behind Viaweb's success.

Ruby's has been startups—Stripe, Coinbase, Instacart, Teespring, Podia, Twitch, Gitlab, Github, etc... despite never having been the most popular language or even close, it's been absolutely dominant as an initial back-end language for top-tier startups.

https://twitter.com/logicmason/status/1371255029412233218

>IMO Ruby has faded because it never found its niche. Java and C# thrive in the corporate world. Python already exists as a dynamically typed server language. As much as people complain, writing server-side web stuff in JS does make sense given it's what you're using in the client. So where does Ruby go?

In the web server side, helping you build web apps faster. That has been it's niche (with Rails) and it's still doing well there.

> Python already exists as a dynamically-typed server language.

Ruby isn't new; it's only slightly younger than Python, and brought things to the table. Rails and Django are roughly the same age (and Django started off more as a CMS). That Python exists isn't an argument against Ruby. Lots of other languages exist, each with their own cost/benefit tradeoffs.

> [...] writing server-side web stuff in JS does make sense given it's what you're using in the client.

I don't understand the argument. Matching client/server language is a different goal than matching task/language, and the task isn't the only driving factor.

There's some crossover in that the language is the same, which means you could standardize on JS developers, but the ecosystems are not the same, and the required overall skillset is different. In wee shops the tradeoff may be worth it, but at scale, the benefit is oversold.

> JS does make sense given it's what you're using in the client.

Well JS is forced upon us on the browser and not everyone is tremendously happy about it. It has improved, but still. Plenty of folks out there will seek other languages, we will never all fully agree on what's good on the backend.

BTW - are we positive JS will have a monopoly on browsers 5-10 years from now? (I'm talking about WebAssembly). Cos if the monopoly is gone JS will die a violent death I think.

> BTW - are we positive JS will have a monopoly on browsers 5-10 years from now?

Yes.

I will assume your question arose from the exuberance of youth.

"Good enough" + inertia = Yes

It's not enough to be better; it has to be so much better, existing infrastructure and training must become moot. And preferably an obvious best to avoid balkanization.

See: Fortune 500 and their continued reliance on COBOL and mainframes rather than opting for replacement and retraining costs.

Ruby captured a lot of webdev market before python became mainstream, and you can see it in the maturity of the tools around this domain (ruby's way more evolved). The tables turned because python became the de-facto ML language, and everyone and your engineering manager will be afraid of betting on anything other than python in fear of hampering future ML-based optimizations (which is in practice utterly wrong, but try tell that to management...)

Agree! But isn’t it kind of weird that we accept that ml happens only in python? I’m biased because I’m working on a startup that makes machine learning sdks in ruby, elixir, golang, php, JavaScript etc. Also, to clarify what you are saying, you think companies are choosing to write their entire stack in python just because ml tools are in python?

> you think companies are choosing to write their entire stack in python just because ml tools are in python?

Going with the masses (e.g Java/Node/Python) is the easy thing to do. It feels "safe". But who knows where Python/Node will be 10 years from now, people are restless and will come up with new things (Deno?) and it could be they will start declining. Java is pretty much unavoidable though.

Eh I’ve been down this road and the tooling in python is just so evolved it’s hard to replicate. Julia is having a hard enough time, I see ML libraries pop up in other languages and they usually simmer out or are used by hobbyists.

As an ML engineer it’s really hard to justify spending your time in a language you will be handicapped by instead of just using python