And there is a lot more: new conferences, new books and new gems.
(Shameless plug: I curate a newsletter called Short Ruby that covers news from Ruby world every week).
Maybe Ruby is not at the level where is was in 2007-2009 but it is also NOT in a downward trend.
It's not only that ruby and ruby on rails are trending down, this has been the case for at least 10 years.
https://berk.es/2022/03/08/the-waning-of-ruby-and-rails/
This is only an article, but you will find the same point of view in many other places. The decline of ruby and RoR is obvious for anyone doing web development. Python is only getting stronger, Typescript the same, not to mention the statically typed competitors like Java with Spring Boot.
I wouldn't doubt that even languages like Go and Rust might surpass ruby soon in web development because as general purpose languages they are already more relevant.
I'm a former RoR developer and I took off the keywords ruby and ruby on rails from my curriculum because for me professionally it makes no sense to invest time in them.
So, if you decide to switch, it is only logical for you to believe that the Ruby community does not bring anything new to the table. I am not saying it as a bad thing. I decided to stay with Ruby, so of course, I am looking for clues that my decision is still reasonable.
One point about your last phrase: the market for Ruby developers - especially seniors - is active. At least in my own corner of the internet.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Ruby%20o...
It could be my optimism, or it could be that I am biased, but I have seen at least a flat line since 2022 in that graph.
As I said, I see an increase when I look at the number of conferences, books, or gems started. That is a strong signal for me that the community is growing, or at least the community thinks it is growing.
Ruby got nothing else bigger than Rails unfortunately no matter how people in that community is hyping Ruby out.
It's okay if Ruby and Rails on a downward trend it might pick up again in the future.
C'mon now, we all know that our industry is like a Fashion industry.
The only reason why Rails is making a comeback is because we're in tough time: no more VC money to hire tons of Engineers to build a web-app.
When money was flowing, folks tend to build over-engineered solution (microservice, mesos, container, k8s, cloud-y orchestration), when money is tight, folks tend to build simple stuff because of lack of resources.
But now there is another complication to an eventual reemergence of ruby on rails: the competition defeated the initial comparative advantage - i.e. the simplicity - of the RoR platform. The premises that justified RoR in the past are too weak today in my opinion. The framework was sold on how easy and no-nosense it was setting it up and start prototyping your commercial solution in a time where the competitors were awkward and epitomized by J2EE, where setting up and developing the most basic application was time consuming and complicated.
Today with Spring Boot, for instance, you can bootstrap and develop your app as quickly and easily as any other cool and alternative framework but with the advantage of using a really popular and fast language.
Technologies don't die quickly and COBOL and Perl are the living proof, but it's really hard to see a bright future for RoR and ruby and I think that most of their contribution was already given.
Spring Boot has been there for ages. It changes nothing really.
Spring Boot was created solely for spinning up Microservice quickly. This is a different segment than Rails.
Spring Boot was overtaken by Golang in the microservice arena in US hi-tech scene. There's just way too may Go-based infrastructure that boosted Go ascend to the Microservice arena from 2016/2017-today. My experience might be just anecdotes but I worked for multiple companies that used to be Java based shop and they all moved away from Java/Scala to Golang and build tons of microservices (whether that strategy is the right thing to pursue or not is a different discussion altogether).
Yeah, Spring Boot might eventually decided to "tack" on the UI option (thymeleaf) but it's too late. Hi-tech already jumped to the latest fashion: Go, docker, k8s, with some sprinkle of ELK and Prometheus for monitoring.
> It's really hard to see a bright future for RoR and ruby and I think that most of their contribution was already given.
They're going to sit nicely in the corner where they belong: web-app. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'd argue the one trending down is Spring, especially after they joined VMWare and now VMWare is part of Broadcom.
Take this with a lot of grain of salt from someone who was a staunch defender of Java during the Spring (DI, MVC), DropWizards, Hibernate=>JPA2 era, skipping Ruby/Rails hype. I moved on from Java to Golang in 2018-2019 and haven't looked back despite switching multiple companies. Prior to that, I was swimming in Java world with multiple companies.
Now that I'm back in the market for my own webapp (side project, fun), I'm not going to use Golang for good reason and I'm not planning to go back to the Spring world either. Rails it is for me...
Looking at the Spring Boot guides, the amount of setup, complexity and lines of code just to get an application running with MySQL doesn't support this statement: https://spring.io/guides/gs/accessing-data-mysql/ Even 20 years ago this would be easier in Rails.
Or try building the blog demo that's build on the Rails homepage video in Spring Boot. 35 minutes to build a blog with rich text (including image uploads), live comments, notification mails and tests. And after changing the database to PostgreSQL, deploy it to production. https://rubyonrails.org/
IMO, it is proposing another way to build web apps that goes back to the original proposal of Rails: simplicity and convention over configuration.
Rails 7 makes building modern web interfaces easy in the same way Rails 2 made building modern web pages easy.
