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.