Availability of resources and talent are very real concerns.

It’s also a bit of a joke to ask if Rails is dead in the community.

Somehow if something didn't have a commit in the past 2 weeks and/or it wasn't top HN for a few weeks, it is dead. Might be if you are resume grifting, however if you just need something that works and is stable, there are many things that have this. We use many packages that have not have updates outside security for years: they don't need updates as they just work. I prefer it that way; updates just to show updates/commits is very lame and somehow a very javascript and open source investor community thing; 'must show progress, let's just change shit that doesn't need changing and break things every minor release for no reason at all!'. But then it is 'not dead' somehow; for me reading a changelog with breaking api changes that don't actually bring new functionality is a good reason never to touch it.

Many people choose what language to invest time in based on the labor market for that language. Companies shouldn't be so religious about the languages they use, but for small teams they usually pick one language for the entire company so that devs can hop between projects without any linguistic learning curve. Hence why there are so many Node + React companies out there; you hire a bunch of react bootcamp grads and they can quickly start working on backend features as well since they already know javascript.

In an ideal world, you hire engineers who have a breadth of knowledge of programming instead of specializing in one language/framework, and then it doesn't matter if a language is "dead" or not, you just pick the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, there's not enough good engineers to go around for such a strategy. As it stands, I would estimate that most people employed with the title of "Software Engineer" barely know what they're doing

I would suspect the same in any job.

Right, I agree. But Perl is dead…

Is it? https://jobs.perl.org/

I don't use it and you may not but it still has an active community and job listings. The last release was on December 20th [1].

This is what I'm talking about: it may not be popular in a "bleeding edge" sense, but it's still being used and developed.

[1] https://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/

"Dead" languages still have codebases that need to be maintained, and companies already invested that need new development may lean on the expertise the company already has, but this is more a sign of subsistence, not thriving life.

uh, it's got a total of three jobs on there currently with two of them over a month old.

Raku's doing alright though

I agree with the general sentiment. But, ecosystem/popularity can matter (you didn't claim it doesn't, just saying).

Specifically, it might be useful to know if a once very popular (dominant in some circles) framework is significantly less so. That downward trend might be relevant for someone, somewhere. "Dead" is still probably not the right word.

More accurately: “Established” versus “Trendy” technology.

Maybe it’s stereotyping, but I strongly suspect users of Trendy technology are more likely to be vocal about it, including by answering surveys, and especially in online forums. I’m personally a PHP developer, one of the least Trendy technologies, and you’ll never see me loudly talking about it like a JavaScript developer. The internet, and frankly HN, would tell you that a language with over a billion Docker pulls isn’t worth learning.

Depends on the frameworks more than the language. Ruby is dependent on Rails, Javascript on Node and the various front-end frameworks, and PHP on Wordpress and Laravel. Not to say that there isn't vanilla development happening in each of these, but that's not what drives adoption. (Especially when you use upstream dependencies like Docker pulls as metrics)

Agreed, but we have all seen the numerous articles about "rails is dead" over the last 5ish years. Devs were really buying that idea and wouldn't touch rails, because the whole dead thing.

I tried hard to find an alternative that could sway me away from rails, but I could not find anything I felt nearly as productive with or enjoyed more. I'm kind of relieved rails is having a comeback. All of the good stuff of rails never really left. People just got too pulled into SPAs and microservices, and rails 8 just showed many who are paying attention how much better things can be.

The group think of SPAs and microservices has been crazy to me. I don't think devs took the time to fully consider how much complexity they were accepting with SPAs and microservices. Certainly SPAs and microservices have their place, but not for everything.