I'm going to lose a lot of karma of this one, but here we go. The organizations I know of that have switched from Ruby to Java have done so for the following reasons:<p>1) Performance. The JVM simply scales better, it is more cost effective in the datacenter. Without mentioning names, I know of significant Silicon Valley darlings that spent huge sums trying to scale Ruby, got crushed, and eventually ripped-and-replaced the backends with Java.<p>2) Skill Availability. There are 7+ million Java programmers, it is easier to hire Java programmers.<p>3) Tool Availability and Maturity.<p>I think Ruby is a fine language, but I see it like PHP, great for rapid prototyping and productivity in the small, but it's version 1 for the lean startup or for the corporate departmental app. Version 2 is Java, C#, etc using the UX and product feature lessons learned from the Ruby prototype.<p>IMHO, Node.js is the new Ruby. It has the benefit of having the same language on the client and the server, but once again, it's going to run into similar scalability issues when large organizations try to use it. I think we're going to run into the same issues, of it becoming a cool bandwagon, the platform being stretched to its breaking point, followed by the realization that there are serious problems.
Businesses (meaning Big Business, I suppose) don't reject Ruby because it's "a dying language". They reject it because they're inherently conservative. Java and .Net rule the roost because they're seen as safe, respectable choices.<p><i>The appearance of risk</i> is more important to most businesses than actual risk. Ruby isn't dominant, therefore it is perceived as risky. Java's complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project, but it's not "risky" because it's dominant.
No, Ruby died last month, but now it's cool again in a retro sort of way. Node.js is what's dying this week. Next month, Tcl is going to make a comeback.
I'm kind of disappointed in the way the author is approaching the launch of Rubinius X. The "death of Ruby" is being used as a rhetorical device. The strategy appears to be that if we all believe that Ruby is actually dying, we're more likely to get behind Rubinius X. Unfortunately, no support is provided for this claim.<p>Rubinius has always been the Ruby that placed purity before pragmatism. I applaud them for that, but putting forth the assertion that Ruby is dying as a means to drum up support for a new generation of Ruby seems like getting off on the wrong foot.
Lets face it - Ruby is a great language and wrapped with Rails it allows to craft napkin idea to working, real-world prototype in record short amount of time.<p>These capabilities prove to be golden for Silicon Valley startups where speed of execution means difference between life and death (VC or nothing).<p>Once done - startups are praying for a quick exit until the issues of gems mess, scaling, performance and deployment nightmares start raising their ugly heads and requires ample continuous investments in administration and management talents to keep things afloat.<p>Serious multi-billion enterprises need performance, guarantees of commercial support from big vendor, speed of compiled languages and cannot afford to use interpreted languages and have their feet stuck in all that swamp.<p>Hence they use Java and dot NET. That's a fact of life.
There are 20-30 ruby conferences every year in the US alone. I've been to about 7. They all had > 200 attendees. Even the less-known ones tend to sell out well in advance.<p>Freelance rates for ruby developers are crazy-high. In Seattle, at least, I'm seeing $200/hr as not uncommon.<p>And on a side note, PHP has been around for about 80 years now and it's still moving along.<p>So I don't think ruby/rails are going to "die" any time soon.
Similarly, C and Java are dying since nobody touts their use of them in PR materials. Also Postgres and HTTP. /snark<p>Technology hipsterism != technology vitality.
Rails is dying.<p>Ruby isn't. It just isn't as popular amongst hipster web programmers anymore...<p>There's some very interesting things going on in the non-Rails and non-web framework Ruby world...
"Ruby is failing to help businesses engage customers. It is seen as inefficient and inferior to other languages."<p>This is pure bullshit. If your business is advertising a particular programming language in order to "engage customers", you are doing something terribly wrong (unless you're in a niche developer market). Your customer doesn't even care about the programming language your site is written in at all. All they want is business value. If the value of your software outweighs the cost, THAT is how you engage customers.<p>Ruby and other dynamic languages like Python and PHP will always have a place, no matter how they do or don't scale. The danger for 95% of startups is complete failure - not succeeding and not getting any traction at all, not "OMG how are we going to scale this with the hundreds of millions of pageviews we have?". A focus on rapid prototyping and productivity for a small team is exactly what most startups need, and Ruby/Rails is a great fit for that. It's not going anywhere, and it's certainly not going to die.
If you love a tool, it won't die. Period.<p>And lots of people (myself included) still love Ruby.<p>And I finally released a potentially useful gem for medium to large Ruby/Rails codebases. Are unmitigated monkeypatches complexifying your codebase to the point of pain? I wrote a gem to help manage that...<p><a href="https://github.com/pmarreck/pachinko" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pmarreck/pachinko</a>
A baseless, attention-grabbing headline, a vague language spec that doesn't really seem to be adding any new ideas (and indeed rejecting some good ones), and no actual working code. Get back to me when you actually write something; until then all this is is a glorified blog post with a "wouldn't it be nice if there were ____ language out there?"
I have so many thoughts about this post right now, that I find it hard to put them into a coherent comment. Still, I want them out there:<p>1) I, too, feel that Ruby is no longer as fashionable as it used to be. I do not think this to be much of a problem and more like the natural way fashions work. But I still think the effect can be observed. It was not long ago that I learned about a cool new project written in Ruby here on HN on a weekly basis. These days, it has become a rare occurence.<p>2) It is a fact that the "cool kids" have moved on. But there is not the one big new thing. Rather, people who were popular in the Ruby world 5 years ago use Scala, Clojure, Node.js, Go and a few other things these days.<p>3) Still, Rails seems to be very popular with startups. Maybe not with the ones that are highly technical. But many of those just trying to get a mvp out there seem to default to rails these days.<p>4) I love Ruby. I used to love learning new programming languages. But ever since writing Ruby code on a daily basis, other languages most often fail to attract me. And I no longer look at technical benefits. Instead I take a look at the syntax and most often I am annoyed. Ruby has this effect on _some_ people, but not on others. For those who do not care about Ruby's aesthetics, there is probably little to keep them from trying out other languages.<p>5) There is little in the list of features on x.rubini.us that I disagree with. But at the same time, there is nothing I ever missed. Also, I am not convinced that all of those issues can or should be solved on the interpreter level.<p>6) Instead of a list of features, I would love to see a list of the kinds of applications that would benefit from those. I am not convinced that Node.js-style network services should be the future of Ruby.
[rant] If you're going to claim that your strong opinions are facts, please treat them as such and give citations or back them up yourself. [/rant]<p>Ruby is not my favorite language anymore, but I still use it and see evidence that there is a huge place it fills in the dev community and ecosystem. I have never used a more expressive language. I'm stating this as a fact from what I have experienced, and I'm giving points that back it up. There are dozens of actively maintained Ruby projects, some of which are the most popular repos on GitHub. I don't see any evidence that the Ruby ecosystem is on a downward trend of activity and is "dying", so I have no reason to think otherwise.<p>This kind of stuff reminds me why I take breaks from HackerNews every once in a while -_- Yuck.
Um, wut?<p>This post is so confusing. I see some half thought out ideas, but no solutions.<p>Ruby may not be Java or JavaScript, but why would you want it to be? You have Java and JavaScript for times when you want to use Java or JavaScript.<p>Use the right tool for the job.
The post contains lots of contradictory facts.<p>First, <i>some</i> people (not all) are using other tools than Ruby. They are looking for a solution to their problems. IMHO Ruby is not even present in the discussion when people make their choices. But Rails is. So I'm not sure that modernizing Ruby is sufficient. Building a modern framework around it could be though. I mean, people go to NodeJS because of Node, not because of Javascript...
Many Rails folks have moved on to other things, many of them to Node.js, and in general development is becoming less homogenous (i.e. Go services interacting with a Rails app/middleware, and an Angular.js front-end). This is a good thing; we are seeing people more willing to use the right tool for the job rather than trying to use one language for everything.
The most common complaint I hear when I talk about Ruby is it's poor performance. The languages I hear mentioned most often (by the complainers) as alternatives include Go and Node.js.<p>I've used Ruby for a few years as a part-time coder. In that time I've never ventured out to try the variety of Ruby interpreters available. For instance, I've heard of JRuby, and I have also heard it's really fast, but it just seems like it's intended for "enterprise" use-cases, rather than my day to day scenarios.<p>If there are all these faster Ruby interpreter variants out there, one 'evangelism' approach could simply be to make them more visible and approachable to end-users.<p>There's also opportunities for package maintainers to work to make these alternatives available in the various Linux/Unix distributions. I want to be able to apt-get them, rather than hunt down a PPA or build via RVM.<p>Is there anything else beyond speed that is holding Ruby back from greater mindshare?
This post really needed to follow up on the whole "Ruby is dying" part with some sort of "and here's how Rubinius X can help" part.<p>The way it's written has caused everyone here to debate whether or not Ruby is dying and completely ignore the announcement. I'm sure the title of the HN link isn't helping either.
It has definitely lost the cool edge that it had. In the midwestern US, it takes longer for trends to penetrate and I saw the Ruby height in popularity here after it had been eating Hacker News alive for a while. Now out here, it is definitely Node.js. All the new young developers talk about it. The old PHP devs in town talk about it, but can't switch to it because all of their libraries and business is in PHP, etc.<p>Interestingly enough, event-loop non-blocking, etc is NEVER the reason mentioned by the devs interested in it and using it. They only mention how nice it is to have basically the same language in the frontend and backend. They claim not having your brain switch like that is a huge benefit (which I could believe, but I haven't tried. (Python+Django+Flask dev myself))
<p><pre><code> To be relevant today, a programming language must provide simple yet powerful facilities for composition and collaboration. A language does not need general immutable state, purely pure functions, or complex type systems, no matter how inferred.
</code></pre>
Is this a poke at Haskell?
<a href="http://x.rubini.us/" rel="nofollow">http://x.rubini.us/</a><p>I like everything I read there except undefined. I have been using Lua for a while now and having only two falsy values is great. I am not convinced adding a third is a good trade-off.
Ruby just seems to be actually getting used by large projects. I personally think that makes sense because you want to see that a language can stand some sort of test of time before entirely adopting it. I think what Jeff Atwood had to say about it [1] when choosing to use it for Discourse [2] shows a different opinion that this article. One that I agree with more.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html</a>
[2]: <a href="http://www.discourse.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.discourse.org/</a>
This is such a flame bait :)
Does Rubinius really needs this?<p>I installed it last week and trying it out with Rails 4 to see how it feels. Ruby is alive and well. And mainstream.
I hate this phrase. It doesn't mean what people think it means and wouldn't make any sense if it did: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule</a>
While I find the project interesting, I see nothing about performance. I'd like to see a focus on performance using optional type annotations.<p><a href="http://www.mirah.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.mirah.org</a>
what a load of rubbish.<p>I have seen absolutely no evidence that Ruby is dying or even ill.<p>This article provides absolutely no evidence but just makes a completely unsubstantiated claim.<p>Saying startups aren't bragging that they are using Ruby as proof that it is dead is pretty dumb. Sure Ruby isn't the hot new thing anymore, it's not as "cool" as it used to be and the people who always want to be trying the latest languages aren't experimenting with it and writing blogs about it. But it's very much alive and kicking, just much more mature and less sexy. Which is inevitable.
Ruby is not dead, it just smells that way.
Seriously though, it's demise is a little overstated - the BBC for one use it quite a bit, as do quite a few startups.
The author of the post seems a bit butthurt that Ruby has not surplanted all other technologies - and it never will.<p>One big problem is that for most businesses their first and perhaps last taste of Ruby comes from Rails, and it's security fails. That is a shame.<p>Having been burnt by the failed promises of Rails ourselves, our company moved onto Python, and never looked back.<p>Also, Ruby is just one tool in the kit, fine for some jobs, patently unsuitable for many others. The evangelists should realise this, and not do a disservice to Ruby by trying to shove it into every place and frankly pissing off potential future adopters of that technology.