Ruby is #5 most used and #3 most loved programming language in the Pragmatic Engineer survey 2025: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmatic-eng...

It means that basically, Ruby is huge in the SF Bay thanks to its adoption by startup founders, but it is a lot less popular outside of the Bay Area.

It's self-fulfilling and nothing to do with the language. Companies want to reduce the number of technologies in their stacks, and Ruby always loses out to Python and Node in part because it's viewed as harder to hire for Ruby skills. So there's less demand, and that leads to fewer people learning it or getting exposed to it on the job.

You also get things thrown at Ruby like how monkey-patching makes it hard to develop at scale which I find unreasonable but is nevertheless part of the conversation.

None of this is really within the gift of Ruby itself to solve. It needs another project like Rails which is so good within its niche that it can't be ignored. Rails itself is tarnished.

As a long time Ruby dev it's really hard to separate from Rails...and there has been both drama (which is ok to an extent, you want passionate people to care about things), but it's unfortunately led to some severe stagnation on the part of the Rails ecosystem versus rivals.

At a time where other frameworks (thinking mostly of Next+Vercel and Laravel here) are merging their frameworks with hosting, deployment, services and ops the Rails ecosystem has gone the other way and tried to bring back "you can host it yourself on a VPS!".

While there are merits to both approaches, the market really seems to have spoken and it prefers the integrated approach.

Having dropped out of the Ruby space for Python and then Erlang, all I can say is that rails was the reason I left.

It seemed that the only thing anyone used ruby for, was for web with rails. Any solution that didn’t involve rails (e.g. sinatra) wasn’t further it.

Ruby is an insular language by design. It's intended to be easy to use and "make programmers happy". Whereas popular languages are usually adopted for falsifiable reasons such as performance, type safety, memory safety, etc.

When it comes to languages that don't take themselves that seriously, the tragedy of Ruby is that Python is easier to get into with its much bigger community and ecosystem. Python is more likely to make the average programmer happy.

At my place of employment, we use Python for everything by default because "everyone knows Python" (which hasn't really been true of our small team where multiple members have far more experience in other languages than Python).

It grows, in my opinion, out of a desire for programmers to be interchangeable code extruders. The idea that a company might have to train anyone, or that a new hire might have to gradually adjust to a team's chosen languages and idioms, is antithetical to the dream of programmers as cheaply replaceable cogs in the machine.

This is a chicken-and-egg problem, and I suspect it can only really be solved when the labor market for programmers heavily favors workers. It's only then that large numbers of professional programmers significantly weigh aesthetics of language in their choices of job. It's also then that startups, which might have cultures that are more opinionated and/or less risk averse when it comes to language choice, are abundant and thriving. The rise of Python at Google worked on that same basis, didn't it?

I don't know that anyone can control the fate of a programming language like this. Maybe all you can do is make sure it's a lovely, useful language and the rest is up to fate.

> Ruby really needs a plan

If there was a plan to be had here, it would be to merge with Crystal and focus on building native apps for phones. Nobody is really happy with any of the options there - Dart/Flutter were close, but fail on the server side. Kotlin Multiplatform is making a serious go at it but it's still too complicated. Bringing the ease of Rails development to native mobile app development would be huge.

Started using Ruby 18 months ago. It's a joy to use. The main problem I encountered switching to it is that the ecosystem is in a very poor state.

>I feel that in many ways ruby is also way too japanese centric. This is fine for a language that is only used in Japan, but a language should have no real country-focus per se, it should be usable everywhere without constraint.

I've never heard this argument before. How exactly is it Japanese centric?

As Please Stop Citing TIOBE (https://nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/) points out, languages do have random fluctuations. It’s garbage data, so this is unsurprising. Between 2016-17 Java dropped 42% and C dropped 62%. That indicated nothing then, because they both promptly recovered. It was just noise.

Don’t take TIOBE seriously. You’ll feel better.

Look at the other suggested metrics - Google trends, GitHub repos, Developer surveys etc. None of these are perfect, but they’re more meaningful than TIOBE.

I’m a new Ruby user. Been a dev for more than a decade and I picked it up for various things over the last year or two. These were not legacy projects, this was purely my curiosity to explore new tools. Have really enjoyed it!

Honestly, Ruby being "niche" helps prevent its enshittification... JS and Python are being turned into Java.

Ruby is still a great language for individuals who want to do things as opposed to simply create slop so they can get a chill job.

Forget TIOBE, maybe look at how much actual software or how many startups use Ruby. I bet it outperforms relative to the total amount of people who use it.

>>WHERE ARE THE NEW RUBY USERS!

Ruby adoption has been low to non existent for as long as I remember. Lets say, 15+ years now. Python kind of took over scripting space. That also means Perl ceded its space to Python as well. But man Perl does one thing really well, and that is acting as a glue language for anything Unix. So it will always have one good use and it does that really well.

Ruby revival was a thing during the time of Rails, but that went away with React + Node taking over the frontend world almost entirely.

>>TIOBE has many issues, but ruby was doing better in the past there, so something changed.

Tiobe indeed has its issues. But their results do not surprise me. Perl is in the top 10. Python is no. 1. Out side of these things you are going to write SQL for database. And mostly Java for apps, and C for embedded systems. C++ for performant applications. And JS for anything on browser.

Ruby just doesn't have a space and a sufficient following in that space.

There is also that problem of not having a Killer app.

We are doomed in the AI age. :(

One disgust-moment I had was when AI narrated nature documentary on BBC or BBC-like channel and faked as David Attenborough. Now people may say "he got a great voice, even after he is gone we should have his voice" (he is old but not dead right now, thankfully - protect David at all costs), but I kind of changed my mind. I think AI should not fake stuff to us. So no fake-narrations either - what you see is what you get, at all times. On youtube this is now rampant; I need a minus AI version for youtube since AI just wastes my time.

It kind of makes sense. I feel that Ruby is a nicer syntax sugar over C at the end of the day.