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Comment by tuyosvawnt | Hacker News Reader

it was never clear what the niche of Ruby was other than being a modernish scripting language for non-critical web dev. I remember Ruby on Rails becoming trendy for web startups with inexperienced programmers (I was one of them) to prototype things in because Active Record was a simple ORM for its time, outside of that there wasn't much other justification for the stack and since the proliferation of similar easy-to-use frameworks in other languages it hasn't been necessary

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The proliferation of frameworks came about from the ideas and design of Ruby on Rails. MVC and ORM had been around before web apps, but it was not consistently used in a web framework until Rails. Convention-over-configuration, “nested doll pattern”, and Rack protocol were all ideas widely ported and copied into other language platforms and frameworks.

Also, ActiveRecord gained significant capabilities with named scopes, something that isn’t as widely copied.

Finally, Ruby itself lends itself well to writing DSLs, something that Javascript and TypeScript sucks at, but sometimes I still see people try and fail.

To be fair, it is my personal opinion that there has not been anything substantially innovative since Rails 5. The features I have seen since is better done with Elixir/Phoenix, mainly because the BEAM runtime makes better concurrency primitives available.

> MVC and ORM had been around before web apps, but it was not consistently used in a web framework until Rails.

WebObjects and EOF were the MVC and ORM frameworks powering Disney (Go.com) almost a decade before Rails existed.

Were those tech open source?

A decade before Rails puts it in 1995. Do you have some resources on this? I like looking into the history of tech.

They were not open source. They were essentially NeXT’s only successful product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects

WebObjects was rewritten from ObjC to Java in the 2000s. EOF, the ORM layer it shared with NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, was rewritten as Core Data and released in Mac OS X Tiger.

WebObjects was demo'd in 1995, and Version 1.0 was released in March 1996, by NeXT (Steve Jobs and crew). In 1997 when Apple bought NeXT and made Jobs its CEO again, it became part of Apple who open sourced it in 2006 and maintained it until 2009 (it powered iTunes, among other things).

Ruby has been my favorite programming language by far for 20 years now. The design decisions just make sense to me, and it is always fun to write.

It really occupies the same niche that Python does, but personally I find ruby more pleasant to work with in every way.

> it was never clear what the niche of Ruby

Ruby on Rails

Chef

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Some of the largest websites in the world run on Ruby: GitHub and Shopify.

Chef seems to be almost dead. I'm still using it personally but don't know a single company in Germany still using it.

I was responding to “it was never clear”

Ruby was used, for example, as the DevOps language prior to Go

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