Yep, it's right now.
> It's 15 minutes of fame was a decade ago.
Nope. Just as popular, if not more so, than ever.
> If they persist in using Ruby and only hiring people with extensive Ruby experience, they're going to run out of talent
The best time to become a Ruby programmer or run a bootcamp teaching Ruby was five years ago. The second best time is now.
> Like all the banks and governments forking over loads of cash for COBOL and Coldfusion
Ha.
> learning another language isn't that big of a deal
Actually Ruby has a very specific and long-standing style that is subtle and takes a while to pick up. Any Rubyist worth their salt can instantly spot code that's simply been "ported" over from some other language community. Ruby has a "Ruby way", which in large part inspired the "Rails way". It's frankly insulting to claim you can just pick up Ruby on a whim and it's no big deal. Sure, Ruby isn't hard to learn at first, and I encourage all beginners out there to give it a real try. You won't be disappointed. But Ruby is also a deep language with a rich vocabulary, and it will take you some time to master it. In some ways, if you're an experienced programmer from another language community, it'll take you longer—because you'll need to unlearn the habits you've picked up before that in Ruby might be considered a code smell.
I suggest you spend some time gaining actual Ruby experience, and then next time you apply for a job asking for Ruby experience, you'll have some. :)
>I suggest you spend some time gaining actual Ruby experience
Which requires those people to get jobs. If they can't get jobs in the language, they can't get experience in the language. This is already an issue with the more popular languages which are converging to the same point.
So much this :) I've been a C# developer for over 20 years and I also write quite a bit of Go. I recently decided to write my NFT app in RoR with backend / batch processes in pure Ruby, and having essentially minimal experience with Ruby it has taken a while to unlearn some of the things that are nearly instinctive to me with (particularly) C#.
That said, so far I am really glad I did what I did. I love Ruby and I think it's incredibly underrated, especially vs Python (though Python is also a great language on its own). Once you really get a handle on Ruby (and Rails), it makes web dev a fun again.
Yeah, I've come across this in loads of companies too. In the end, I think those sort of companies don't understand that once you grok 2-3 languages, the rest of them mostly look/work the same (except the really different ones), and they are just looking for "code-monkeys" to program with them for a year or two.
I mean, if you know 2-3, say, static class-based OOP languages, other static, class-based OOP languages mostly look/work the same.
If you know 3+ languages with wildly divergent paradigms, you can probably pick up most new languages even if they don't look/work the same.
But if you know 2-3 closely related languages, one that isn't closely related to those 2-3 can be problematic.
Indeed. Not sure if you left it out on purpose, but my comment included (right after the part you quoted) the following: "(except the really different ones)", which covers exactly what you're talking about :)
I don't think most people simply "accidentally grok" or use Smalltalk, Lisp or Raku; therefore I consider most people don't have what takes to grok Ruby either.
People here are acting Ruby is anywhere on the same level of difficulty for a regular high-level OOP developer as C++ or Haskell.
I think that being able to dynamically replace behavior from almost anything at any point in your program is pretty much very different from Python, Java and C#.
The only other mainstream language with this capacity is Erlang, and Erlang is not exactly what I would call mainstream language.
I believe you're severally overestimating the impact and importance of one quirk when many developers are picking up wildly differing languages and decently successful at it all the time.
Javascript is pretty popular.
How so - Python is dynamic. Django does quote some magic (e.g defining methods on the fly etc).
Which is part of why I've pretty much sworn it off forever, after working on several Rails projects over the years. I never, ever want to onboard to a Rails project again, if I can help it.
They have doubled down on Rails, so if they hire people who aren't already in the ballgame, they will either be faced with people who want to change things (which creates conflicts) or have to train people to avoid the speed bumps in the existing system (which also pushes people to want to change things).
I'm curious, was your position during the interview that you were beyond excited to pick up Rails as your next technology?
Finally, you never know... their feedback might have also just been a kinder let down... maybe they didn't feel your programming chops were up to their required level. Who knows...
COBOL itself it's actually very cheap and simple; in fact "so simple anyone can use it because it's just english" /s
What banks and governments fork loads of cash for, it's a highly vertically scalable, performant and redundant system that works (and keeps working) under heavy load and concurrency. A SaaS cloud (including the ludicrous prices you pay for a SaaS when you need to scale your service...) before SaaS clouds were a thing. A mainframe computer with a support contract.
I agree that for experienced developer requirement to have extensive experience with particular language may not be all that important.
But rewriting perfectly working software just because developers knowing legacy language is too expensive is a big mistake. They would waste way way more trying to implement a perfect copy of the old system with "cheaper" developers.
Ruby has had it's heyday. It's 15 minutes of fame was a decade ago. If they persist in using Ruby and only hiring people with extensive Ruby experience, they're going to run out of talent AND have to pay over market rate to get people in their specialization. Like all the banks and governments forking over loads of cash for COBOL and Coldfusion consultants because the refused to modernize.