I've spent the past couple weeks thinking about what framework I want to use to build static sites. I've primarily used Middleman, or Jekyll when working with collaborators (think of Middleman as Jekyll but with no restrictions -- i.e. You don't have to use Liquid and you can write plain old Ruby objects and include them as with a typical full-stack app).<p>I used to do Ruby because of Rails work...now I do my work exclusively in Python and Node. I thought it'd be worthwhile to move to a new framework just so I don't have to juggle so many languages on a daily basis. Lektor (Python) is exciting and I'll check it out as a way to build client sites...but it's not quite as flexible as Middleman (to be fair, Lektor is very new)...Pelican looks good as well...but for now, I think Middleman hits the perfect spot for speed of deployment and hackability (it recently extricated itself from sprockets so that you can incorporate webpack.js or whatever asset build system you like), even accounting for Middleman's and Ruby's slow speed of execution versus the hugely popular Hugo (static framework in Go)<p>The truth of it is, is that once you've picked up Ruby, nothing feels quite as nice as a scripting glue language. I haven't kept up much with updates to the language...all I know is that yesterday, I finally updated my Ruby environment manager (rbenv)...it had been 2 years...and changed my system Ruby to 2.3.1 (from 2.1.5)...I had to update a few version numbers for dependencies, but otherwise, all of my old projects worked with barely a hitch...and it took me no time to get into writing custom plugins for my next Middleman site.<p>It does seem that the excitement over Rails and Ruby has ebbed, if you look at Github stats and Stackoverflow's latest survey. I am curious to see where the language can go from here, or how it can make a strong niche for itself besides Rails. but of all the "old" languages that I sometimes have to come back to, Ruby has been the most welcoming.