Ruby on Rails used to be one of the most popular ways of implementing MVC applications in the server. Has Ruby been hit by a similar fate?

I have a friend that swears up and down that his startup on Erlang was able to deliver incredible speed of development and stability specifically because of language choice.

WhatsApp, Facebook Chat used Erlang, and Discord is still using Elixir… make of that what you will, I suppose.

And Ruby / Rails + your frontend of choice is still a ridiculously productive stack to bring up an app, and probably run it at any scale you’re likely to realistically hit (poster child being Shopify)… if you ever get to stage of “scaling problems”, you are at a stage where you’d be rearchitecting parts of your stack regardless of what your original implementation was in.

So in sum, choosing a particular language because of popularity, I think, is not particularly useful framing. I’d say, choose one because it either gives you joy to write in and maps to your thought process well, or because it has a particularly strong ecosystem for the subject matter. Life is too short to program every day in a language that you dislike just because you think it’s the “safe choice” :)

That's an interesting point. Do you think your friend was able to deliver at such speed because of the familiarity with Erlang? Or was it so, that even with a lack of familiarity, the other advantages of the language were overwhelming? Also, may I ask what kind of application was being developed?

I also wonder how we can define popularity better. Does that mean industry acceptance, number of GitHub repositories, number of StackOverflow questions, number of libraries, developer satisfaction surveys, etc. If you choose different metrics here, different languages and frameworks will appear popular. Svelte for example seems to be on top of some developer satisfaction surveys, but React is still one of the number one choices for frontends. C is the industry standard for embedded, but developers often do not enjoy programming in it.

I’m not sure how much Erlang he had done before he started the project… it was something in the professional group chat space, but Slack ate the world.

Yeah, there is always a balance to strike and a multitude of factors that might lean the decision this way or that…

And even in something like embedded it seems like there is movement, I have seen some posts about people using Zig or Rust or Nim for embedded programming for example.

Not dead just yet but things are not looking promising. eg Ruby is 20th on TIOBE vs 13th last year. Other measures are showing a similar downward trend.

Not impossible to reverse but very hard, especially since Ruby only has once niche and has not been doing well there.

Ask any company dependent on Ruby how its recruiting efforts are going.

Anyone from Square, Stripe, or Shopify want to chime in on this?

I haven't had a problem finding Ruby devs, but I haven't had to hire in a couple of years.

I'm not at any of those companies but it's harder than it was five years ago for sure.

I’ve got a handful of excellent ruby devs available for project work. If anyone needs help, holler.

It still seems pretty relevant and useful.

I was back on the job market not too long ago and I was stunned to discover how many startups are still using Rails. It's well off the hype peak now but there's a lot more life in it than I supposed.