Ruby captured a lot of webdev market before python became mainstream, and you can see it in the maturity of the tools around this domain (ruby's way more evolved). The tables turned because python became the de-facto ML language, and everyone and your engineering manager will be afraid of betting on anything other than python in fear of hampering future ML-based optimizations (which is in practice utterly wrong, but try tell that to management...)

The language is less important than the supporting tooling. IMHO we are just now, a decade later, seeing frameworks crop up in node that look anything like the out of the box usefulness that was the rails and django apps I was first exposed to. My honest opinion from several startups is that most sub ten year vets just don’t know that stuff existed already and / or just how much you can ask of your tech stack. I generally agree with your point though.

> JS does make sense given it's what you're using in the client.

Well JS is forced upon us on the browser and not everyone is tremendously happy about it. It has improved, but still. Plenty of folks out there will seek other languages, we will never all fully agree on what's good on the backend.

BTW - are we positive JS will have a monopoly on browsers 5-10 years from now? (I'm talking about WebAssembly). Cos if the monopoly is gone JS will die a violent death I think.

Ruby's has been startups—Stripe, Coinbase, Instacart, Teespring, Podia, Twitch, Gitlab, Github, etc... despite never having been the most popular language or even close, it's been absolutely dominant as an initial back-end language for top-tier startups.

https://twitter.com/logicmason/status/1371255029412233218

>IMO Ruby has faded because it never found its niche. Java and C# thrive in the corporate world. Python already exists as a dynamically typed server language. As much as people complain, writing server-side web stuff in JS does make sense given it's what you're using in the client. So where does Ruby go?

In the web server side, helping you build web apps faster. That has been it's niche (with Rails) and it's still doing well there.

> Python already exists as a dynamically-typed server language.

Ruby isn't new; it's only slightly younger than Python, and brought things to the table. Rails and Django are roughly the same age (and Django started off more as a CMS). That Python exists isn't an argument against Ruby. Lots of other languages exist, each with their own cost/benefit tradeoffs.

> [...] writing server-side web stuff in JS does make sense given it's what you're using in the client.

I don't understand the argument. Matching client/server language is a different goal than matching task/language, and the task isn't the only driving factor.

There's some crossover in that the language is the same, which means you could standardize on JS developers, but the ecosystems are not the same, and the required overall skillset is different. In wee shops the tradeoff may be worth it, but at scale, the benefit is oversold.