Some years ago Ruby in conjunction with rails was an absolute hype. In the Rails User Group in Zürich we had meetups with 30 people every two weeks. The meetings every two weeks have been retained, but often we are just five to ten people now. Is the great time of Ruby over or is it just a temporary decline? Is Perl 6 now taking over, since it is ready?
Perl 6 is cool and could challenge Ruby and it is now getting more and more towards production readiness. This will happen next year. This is what we will say next year. But Perl 6 is or will be very cool, stay tuned… What about Perl 5? At least Allison Randall still likes Perl (5). But it has other areas of strength than Ruby, so I will leave my opinionated writing focused on Ruby.
But the hype is right now in the area of JavaScript.
There are approaches to use server side JavaScript, which are interesting, because JavaScript needs to be dealt with on the client anyway and then it is tempting to have the same language on both sides.
There are also approaches to move back from the server to the client and put more functionality into the client and make the server less relevant, at least the percentage of development effort of the client gets more and of the server gets less.
There are cool frameworks for the client development in JavaScript and in conjunction with HTML5 and these frameworks a lot can be achieved.
On the other hand we are exploring NoSQL-databases like MongoDB and MongoDB is using JavaScript with some extension library as query language.
The general hype is toward functional programming and voila, JavaScript is functional, it is the most functional of the languages that have been established for a long time and brought the functional paradigm to every developer and even to the more sophisticated web designer, everything under the radar and long time before we knew how cool functional programming is. On the other hand, Ruby (and by the way Perl and especially Perl6) allow programming according to the functional paradigm as well, if used appropriately. But in JavaScript it is slightly more natural.
Then we have more contenders. Java is not dying so soon and it is still strong on its web frameworks, JavaServerFaces and one million others, not so bad actually.
And the idea of rails or at least its name, has been taken over by the groovy guys to develop groovy on grails, which integrates nicely with a Java enterprise backend.
And the more functional languages like F#, Scala, Haskell, Erlang, Elixir (and some others for the guys that don’t find Haskell theoretical enough) are around and gaining or retaining some popularity. Will Scala support the Erlang-VM as alternative backend, like JavaScript and JVM are supported today (and dotnet-CLI in the past)? And Scala has a promising web framework with play, that does WebServices right, which is what is actually needed for the modern client side JavaScript frameworks, just as an example.
PHP was always the ugly baby, why did they implement a second Perl based on the subset of Perl they understood? Well, I am not advocating PHP at all, but there are some pretty decent PHP-applications that are working really well with high load, like Wikipedia.
The unequal twin of Ruby, Python, is doing pretty well as well on attempting to get a web framework called Django. I have not investigated it at all, but it seems to exist.
So, where is ruby and rails? Ruby is a beautiful language, that has done many things better than any of the languages mentioned here:
It is easy to learn.
It has a nice and complete and consequent concept for object orientation.
It allows all the functional programming, most of it pretty natural.
It has decent numerical types by default. Integer grow to arbitrary length, Rationals are included and Complex numbers are included. JavaScript does not even have integers, it just has one numerical type: double precision floating point.
It allows extending, even operator overloading for new numerical types.
And it has a useful and easily accessible web framework like rails and actually some contender as alternative web frameworks, like camping, sinatra and some others.
And the development effort and the amount of code needed for a certain functionality is still lower than in Java or C# or COBOL.
I do believe that the web applications that are mostly server based and are using just HTML or minimal JavaScript still have their place and will be discovered again as useful for many application areas.
To conclude, I think that Ruby did not make it to become the replacement for Java, that some saw in it and that was due according to the history of replacement of other mainstream languages that have moved to legacy in the past. But I do believe that it will play an important role for some years to come and beyond the current JavaScript hype. Off course it will be challenged again in the future and maybe something will replace the main stream and will make Ruby on Rails just another legacy area for web applications. But I don’t even have an idea what that will be. I don’t think JavaScript. Perl6, Scala, F# or Clojure do have technical potential to do so, but I do not see that happening in the near future. Maybe something new will come up? Or something old? Just remember, Ruby is about as old as Java.
We will see.
Read more in this discussion on Quora.
For those who are interested, I actually teach Ruby and it is possible to arrange trainings for two to five days, depending on the previous knowledge of the participants and the goals.
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