The future of ruby

Ruby
1

according to this article:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

both ruby and php are loosing “market share”, perl is holding its own,
and of course the mobile-device languages are rapidly rising.

my first impression was that the other languages are increasing rapidly,
but this makes it look like both ruby and php are loosing ground.

i have been a php guy for years and am considering throwing everything
into ruby, but i want to pick a language that will be around for years
to come, and be increasing in popularity.

any opinions?

2

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 8:23 AM, mark e. [email protected]
wrote:

i have been a php guy for years and am considering throwing everything
into ruby, but i want to pick a language that will be around for years
to come, and be increasing in popularity.

any opinions?

–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Java or Javascript. Both are tolerable, even enjoyable at times. Java
and C
have held top spot for quite a while. Javascript is universally needed
because it has a monopoly on the web. C# wouldn’t be bad except for
being
wedded to M$. I have only tried Objective-C once, so not really
qualified
to debate its merits.

Though as a programmer, it’s not like you have to worry about job
security,
especially if you know rails, which has demand far in excess of supply.

3

Excerpts from mark e.'s message of Tue Jan 31 15:23:55 +0100 2012:

Home - TIOBE
both ruby and php are loosing “market share”, perl is holding its own,
and of course the mobile-device languages are rapidly rising.
define “market share” ? How do they do it? lost 2%? Wow…
Oh, they talk about it:

"
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the
popularity
of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The
ratings
are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and
third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!,
Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the
ratings.
Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming
language
or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
"

So a change in any of those sources (such as google) can cause such a 2%
change for PHP which you worry about.

I’d not pay attention to the index too much because

  • Scala is not listed (and many companies are using it making money …)
  • smaller market share doesn’t mean you can make less money.

If in doubt you can always hire programmers knowing the target language
if you have customers.

i have been a php guy for years and am considering throwing everything
into ruby, but i want to pick a language that will be around for years
to come, and be increasing in popularity.
Years to come? Languages also change over years. C# 1.0 is not the same
as C# 4.0 etc.

I’d not throw everything into a new language. Start learning it. Start
playing with the framework. Learning either Python,Ruby, … may be an
advantage because both languages are used for for more use cases such as
scripting applications. Also testing support is much better in Ruby than
PHP. And that its also “ruby people” creating things like ‘HAML’
template engines etc and its short style makes me like it and the
community.

Marc W.

4

TIOBE is worthless.

5

thank you all very much! this is quite a community that ruby has.

when i say “throw everything”, i mean learn it enough to be dangerous,
learn the framework, etc

i noticed when i switched from perl to php, i quickly forgot my perl
knowledge. the same would probably happen with php if i were to switch
to ruby.

i assume the best framework for ruby is rails? or is that like asking
the best sports team in a pub?

6

For heavy web development, probably yes. For a simple site with a
couple of subpages and maybe some dynamic content, you might have less
clutter and less headache using lightweight libraries, like Camping or
Sinatra.

For non-web development, you won’t use Rails at all (why would you).

– Matma R.

7

let me clarify just a bit when i said “throw everything”:

i would expect to pay a few $$$$$ to actually attend a class and learn
RoR.

yes i could probably force myself to sit down and read an intro book,
but unlike everybody else here, i am far too lazy and lack the
discipline.

i did get through the ruby “visual quickstart guide” by Ullman.

it’s the framework subject i want spoon-fed to me.

8

On Jan 31, 2012, at 8:24 PM, Bartosz Dziewoński wrote:

For heavy web development, probably yes. For a simple site with a
couple of subpages and maybe some dynamic content, you might have less
clutter and less headache using lightweight libraries, like Camping or
Sinatra.

Define “heavy web development”. I actually don’t like Rails for special
tasks
like pure apis, callback sites, upload locations etc. Then again, I’m
biased:
I hack on Padrino.

I’d actually use Rails for “simple sites”: its easy to start with,
and small multi-page applications are written very quickly using it.
Performance is ok. Helpers are in place to do a bit of ajaxy stuff. No
reason
to pick your stack.

Best Regards,
Florian