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Comment by eggsnbacon1 | Hacker News Reader

IMO its happening to languages that are no longer popular enough to maintain multiple frameworks. The difference with Ruby is that it was always mostly rails. I'm worried Ruby will descend into a Rails death spiral. Depending so heavily on one framework stops innovation

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I think you’re right to worry, I wouldn’t be able to think of any reason to use Ruby instead of something else if Rails is off the table (in terms of ecosystem, not talking about personal preference here). Which is a shame because I like it the most of all the scripting languages, but Rails just sucks all the air out of Ruby.

I recently used Ruby, Roda, and soap4r for a JSON-to-SOAP gateway project. We didn’t need all of the ceremony of Rails (no database), and needed more velocity than Java could give us, and none of the Elixir/Erlang SOAP libraries actually worked with the WSDLs (plural) we had.

There’s a _lot_ of reasons to use Ruby if Rails is off the table.

Unless you're into data science, what can u do in Python that you wouldn't be able to do in Ruby? Most "famous" gems are still well maintained afaik. The Ruby eco system is still nothing to sneeze at.

Ruby became niche long ago, just have to accept it. It doesn't mean you won't find work in Ruby if that's what you want, plenty of companies depend on it. Rewrites in different stacks are quite impossible sometimes.

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