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Comment by kinduff | Hacker News Reader

Ruby and Rails Engineer here, for a decade now.

I had the fortune to be part of new startups that chose RoR for all the good reasons, but also because at the time it was trendy.

Nowadays I keep finding RoR jobs but I see more and more legacy applications that need to be maintained in order to move to a new technology.

I've had some discussions with founders and they always mention the same problem: there are not a lot of Ruby developers or they are expensive. So they choose to go with another technology, aka Javascript.

I like the language but I like others more, but Ruby brings bread to my table and I'm sure it will keep providing as long as Ruby engineers become founders or companies keep mantaining legacy projects built with the tecnology.

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"Nowadays I keep finding RoR jobs but I see more and more legacy applications that need to be maintained in order to move to a new technology."

This is exactly the situation with a number of long-standing, formerly popular languages. ColdFusion and PHP jump to mind. They're fine languages and people love them, but if no one's paying, why bother sticking to them? Loving a programming language doesn't pay the bills.

"I'm sure it will keep providing as long as Ruby engineers become founders or companies keep maintaining legacy projects built with the technology."

My previous employer was maintaining over 30 acquired company's worth of legacy code bases. They replaced common functionality via new microservices and would sometimes replace an entire product via a new acquisition. It's sometimes a better ROI to replace instead of maintaining or building.

> This is exactly the situation with a number of long-standing, formerly popular languages.

This is also not new. I've replaced a number of "legacy" apps because, basically, it was too hard to find devs for the current language. This was happening with perl in the early 2000s, PHP in the 2010s, Ruby now. Java has gone through surges and waning of support over the years. When I was a fresh devs, the old timers told me about this thing called serverside javascript.

This kind of thing is inevitable. It is something that businesses just need to plan for, because it can happen with established languages (PHP) just as easily as it can for trendy ones. And you can't predict future generation's attitudes towards tech.

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