What do you mean "left behind"? Are you saying people will actually gt "left behind" or just that people will _feel_ like they're left behind?

At this poitn you can find tools that can make demos easier to build or get you further in a hackathon, but Rails embodies "Slow is steady and steady is fast." If you're trying to build something that will stick around and can grow (like a startup outside of the latest VC crazes) then Rails will arguably do better at keeping your tools relevant and supported in the long run. That is, assuming you're building something that needs a steady backend for your application.

> At this point you can find tools that can make demos easier to build or get you further in a hackathon.

I don't understand this at all. ruby on rails is probably peak technology for getting something up an running fast at a hackathon. its a very streamlined experince with a ton of drop in plugins for getting to the product part of the mvp. Maintaining a ruby app is a nightmare overtime. At least it was 5 years ago the last time I worked fulltime in a startup using ruby on rails.

These days I use elixir. its higher performance and reasonably fast to write in but I woudln't say its as productive as ruby on rails if you're competing in a hackathon.

Maintenance nightmares are a product of organizational culture, not any particular framework.

Any language can get you a maintenance nightmare, but a lack of types and a monolith will get you there faster.

Nothing in ruby forces you to make it a monolith of course, but the lack of types hurts

The language encourages metaprogramming, and disencourages typing. This makes maintenance much more complicated when compared to other languages such as Python, typescript or PHP.

> What do you mean "left behind"? Are you saying people will actually get "left behind" or just that people will _feel_ like they're left behind?

Feel.

Heh, maybe us engineers need to be better disciplined about what "greatest" is.

> maybe us engineers

I’ve started qualifying such statements… “you mean a real engineer or just a software developer?

You mean that CSS engineers is not a true title!?

Nah, RoR failed because nobody wants to write code in an untyped, monkey-patch-friendly language anymore.

I don't really know if I would agree on saying that RoR failed, from recent my experiences, it's still a sought after tool for startups.

I do share your opinion on the untyped part, it's a bit of a bummer but there are gems to Ruby that helps with that.

Regarding the monkey patches, it's a concern many have and because of that, there is now a cleaner way of doing it! It's called a refinement. It's like monkey patching but in a more controlled way where you don't affect the global namespace.

https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/syntax/refinements_rdoc...

Failed or not, but at least for 2020 Y-Combinator Ruby-based startups valuation was more than other programming languages based startups combined.

https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup...

"Initial back-end language(s)"

Lmao you really think Stripe is still running primarily on Ruby? Yeah it's good for prototyping because it's fast to write in, but unmaintainable as hell for a real business.

Nobody said they still run on Ruby, but it’s far from “RoR failed”. Other example would be GitHub, still runs on Rails. Shopify, still runs on Rails. I agree, less people doing coding in Ruby, I myself written last line of Ruby a decade ago, but saying “RoR has failed” is just not true.

Update: found a thread here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834840 I doubt they’ve rewritten everything to Java for the last three years.