Is Rails in decline?

Rails
1

Hi,

I was doing Rails and was hired away to do .NET. I’m wondering what
the state of Ruby/Rails is? I’ve heard it is in decline…

I’m asking because I want to build an app in my spare time. It would
make more sense to do it in C# because I could leverage what I know.
But Rails was my first love…I prefer to work in it. I just don’t
want to spend time on something that people aren’t interested in
anymore…

Do people have a sense of the demand/interest/support level that Ruby
and Rails has?

Thanks,

Ron

2

On May 11, 5:38 pm, Ron [email protected] wrote:

Hi,

I was doing Rails and was hired away to do .NET. I’m wondering what
the state of Ruby/Rails is? I’ve heard it is in decline…

Railsconf certainly seemed healthy, a fair chunk of people new to
rails (and plenty of more experienced people too).

Fred

3

On May 11, 2009, at 12:38 PM, Ron wrote:

Do people have a sense of the demand/interest/support level that Ruby
and Rails has?

Thanks,

Ron

If you want to build something in your spare time, why would you use
anything you didn’t love?

There are plenty of people/companies working with Rails. The fact that
it is in decline for you (you let yourself be hired away after all)
doesn’t mean that the industry is being lured away from the power and
expressiveness of Ruby (and Rails) so easily.

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

4

Rob B. wrote:

There are plenty of people/companies working with Rails. The fact that
it is in decline for you (you let yourself be hired away after all)
doesn’t mean that the industry is being lured away from the power and
expressiveness of Ruby (and Rails) so easily.

I don’t agree, I think that the impression on people like Ron is the
same as on the industry as a whole, and I think that it is mainly due
to the very poor PR that Rails have. Take the recent Twitter Scale
Controversy for instance, I didn’t see an official and strong response
to that, although some individuals did a good job responding to it in
their
personal blogs. The same about the recent departure of Mike G.
(which was one of the most active promoters of the technology) after the
“Pr0n Star” issue. Such things give the impression that the technology
is
poor and the community is unstable or even immature.
I’m a tech person, so I evaluate Rails based on technical merits, but
managers usually have a very different point of view when choosing a
technology.

5

I don’t think RoR is in decline. Here in silicon valley, RoR is
gaining foothold with startup companies.
Java and C++ are traditionally favored by big corporations.