I have always heard that Ruby is a great prototyping language, which is why many startups used it.<p>Companies like Github, Shopify, and others are built on it.<p>- What are the factors that led to Ruby's decline?<p>- Specifically, why do we see fewer startups building on Ruby?<p>- Will we see Ruby bounce back?
My personal controversial theory: lack of first class support for Windows. This was a big reason why Python had a renaissance amongst learners, academia, data journalists, and a lot of more "casual" developers that Ruby is perfectly suited for. Python has pretty much eaten up the "not a webapp" market Ruby could have easily had and JavaScript rapidly began eating up the webapp market from the other side, leaving Ruby with quite few unique selling points (though I still love it myself, I'm speaking in broad ecosystem terms).
I think Ruby itself has lost its trend, but people who use it keep using it.
We are in a time where people prefer compiled, statically typed languages which contributes to Ruby losing its popularity, that's why alternatives like Crystal is growing.<p>Another reason is Ruby is tightly coupled with the Rails framework, Ruby should really try to separate itself from it and shine on its own.<p>There is nothing Ruby offers that other languages lacks on, I find it exceptionally well for prototyping and for gluing togheter different things through the CLI etc, and I will continue using Ruby for that.<p>I believe Ruby will bounce back in the future, we are currently seeing lots of cool new features being introduces after Ruby 3 like YJIT & Ractors!
Personnally, I didn't commit because the gem ecosystem was hit or miss, and the culture was about getting things pretty instead of robust (e.g: nice docs but monkey patching everywhere).<p>Plus on the long run, parskng ruby is difficult for my brain because of optional parenthesis.<p>Enventuly I sticked to python. I know people critize python packaging a lot, but it was the least of evils in 2010, much better than the competition.
Static type system!<p>It's the only reason Ruby (and Rails community) declined.<p>Longer answer: To work effectively with Ruby (and RoR), you need a dedicated team to maintain the test suite, because it's the ONLY way to go forward.<p>In case you're a small startup, it's a NO.