Until four or five years ago, there was still plenty of maintenance work to be had, but even that has pretty much dried up now.
But I'm not arguing Ruby is well past it's peak - that is (sad, to me) fact because I happen to think it's a gorgeous language but it is what it is. I guess I'll have to get used to Python/Node or maybe switch to low level which is an old and perhaps unrealistic old dream of mine.
Were you around for the first (pre-2000) dotcom boom? From where I was sitting (freelancing in London) it sometimes seemed that all of the first wave of dotcom companies were writing their apps in Perl.
In fact, I've often thought that a lot of Perl's current bad reputation stems from this generation's CTOs and dev managers being people who suffered writing those Perl web apps at a time when no-one knew how any of this stuff was supposed to work and careful design went out the window in the rush to get things to market before the bubble burst.
IME, big older companies have Perl code chugging along, but not very visible. Part of this is also because there's the perception that it is hard to attract developers if the company mentions Perl any where in the job description.
IMDb.
Exactly, the second wave of dotcom software was largely written using frameworks that built on the mistakes we'd been making in the first wave.
And because, so many programmers had memories of horrible experiences trying to beat Perl/CGI applications into submission, it was probably too late for Perl even then - although a large number of excellent Perl tools (Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Template Toolkit, Moose, PSGI to name just a few) were emerging at about the same time as Ruby on Rails or Django.
(Having said that, I suspect that the Ruby community's love of "first, install a Ruby version manager" does it no favors when it comes to adoption for these sorts of small projects, although the same is arguably true of Python.)
And I've been prototyping a few project ideas (in Perl) to see if any of them could be a sustainable source of passive income. Of course, if any of them grow to the extent that they need a development team, I'll need to rewrite them in a more sustainable language.