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Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

Yeah.. not sure why the love for Ruby faded in startup-world

I think ruby is alive and well for a lot of startups. I do think it is being squeezed on three sides though.

* From javascript. If you have a app like front end, you are going to use js. Why not have the whole stack be js and have your developers use only one language.

* From python for anything web + data science. Again, why not have your whole stack be in one language?

* From lack of hype. Rails is still evolving, but a lot of packages are not seeing releases (I have used packages 3-4 years old). This indicates to me that the energy isn't there in the community the way it used to be. I have seen the consultants who are always on the bleeding edge move on to elixir.

That said I have seen plenty of startups using ruby (really rails) and staffing when I hired for ruby wasn't an issue.

I do help run a local ruby meetup and attendance is good but not exceptional (15-40 people every month). So that may skew my viewpoint.

"From JavaScript" also includes another side: When your frontend is in JS, your backend can be a simple REST API. And building a REST API requires much less framework than building a server-side-rendering webapp does, so it's tempting to use Go or Rust or whatever you like.

Agreed. I still think that ruby is great for jamming out an API (far better in terms of development speed than go or rust) but a lot of the great gems that can speed up development assume server side rendering. That plus the fact that go/rust/whatever are probably more "interesting" and faster (at runtime) than ruby is an additional obstacle (for ruby!).

You’ll need (probably) at least: -Database connection -An ORM -Middleware against attacks / rate limiting -Caching -Jobs / workers -A rendering engine for email and maybe pdf -Some sort of admin/backend -Logging -Validation

I’ve written an API once from scratch. Actually twice. First time in Modena, because it was all the hype, but it was arcane. Then Sinatra, where I ended up creating all of the above. Rails is excellent for APIs.

Rust is nice, but I’m not sure if I’d like it for all of an API. I don’t like go. Crystal seems great, because it’s typed and it’s also super fast.

Have you looked at Graphiti? Haven't had a chance to use it but it looks great for creating APIs in rails:

https://www.graphiti.dev/guides/

Probably JS taking over web dev and invading the server.

I loved Ruby, but unfortunately it didn't hold on to any kind of "killer app" role after Rails clones showed up in other language. I've switched to Elixir/Phoenix in that space and not looked back.

With the rise in ML and data science over the past years, Python finally has a killer app that no other scripting languages come close to touching. I migrated completely from Ruby when I started dabbling in ML, Pandas, etc.

From personal experience, hiring for Ruby development seemed to get a lot harder and of the few candidates that applied, many couldn't do FizzBuzz.

OTOH I couldn't find a Ruby job in my town. Learning Scala these days.

I've been working since the 90s and I never attempted to do FizzBuzz. Is it really relevant? Maybe to screen junior developers out of college?

So, as someone who spends maybe 20% of their time hiring, it's still a very effective screen. You wouldn't believe how many people can't do it. People at big companies, respected places. It's surprising.

Wow, that's depressing.

I used a different screen (having people make change based on an arbitrary amount, so if the input was 81, you'd return [25, 25, 25, 5, 1], as we were in the USA) and it was also helpful. I didn't track the number of people that it stymied though.

Yah, that's also a good one. I like the variant that asks how many different ways you can make change for a given amount and a given array of currencies.

(I always feel weird talking about interview questions publicly, but honestly anyone who prepares that diligently deserves to go to the next stage. If anyone's reading this because they're preparing for an interview with me and I ask this question, just mention this comment and I'll be impressed.)

That sounds like a really fun one, and isn't dependent on people knowing about the modulus operator (which is rarely used)

If someone can't do FizzBuzz, I'm not going to waste an hour interviewing. I get a surprising number of non new-college grads failing to do it.

Correct me if i 'm wrong, isn't this one 'for' loop with 3 nested 'if' conditions ?

I love Ruby but my customers are with Python and Elixir now. I do Ruby 5 to 10% of the time. Nearly all my personal project except some Node.

I think many people still "love" ruby I never liked Python from day 1 of my work (I am Ruby on Rails Dev for my job)

Wish there are more useful projects written in ruby :)

I am trying to find a place in the industry - again, starting from RoR. I absolutely love Ruby. And all this talk of "Ruby dying" makes me feel sad. The rational thing to do is to move on, and learn something popular, like node.js but the more I see Ruby in action, I just can't pull myself away from it.

I had managed to get a job as a Java developer a long time ago, but at that time all I could do was barely write toy apps in Java and I had no exposure to stuff like design patterns. The whole experience left me in a bad place. Now after all these years, Ruby feels like a breath of fresh air, and the texts that I have come across on the subject - Design Patterns in Ruby, Practical OOD in Ruby, Ruby under a Microscope etc. have increased my interest in the language.

But more and more frequent articles on Ruby's decline are pretty disheartening.

Ruby's future may actually not be Ruby itself. Probably the major problem with Ruby is its performance, which is slow even compared to other interpreted languages. While I'm not sure it is really production ready yet, Crystal is very interesting -- it's a native compiled statically typed language that nevertheless feels very much like Ruby. Check it out if you haven't.

It’s faster than python. And crystal is often faster than go.

I saw Tenderlove's interview on SE Radio, about Ruby internals. He seemed optimistic, but also because he's been working on a performance related project for the past few years now. Anyway, I'm hopeful.

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