What Happened to Ruby on Rails?

Question

I remember it was quite popular 10 to 15 years ago and even used at many a startup. I rarely hear about it now. I am guessing there are still some legacy companies using it, or maybe many of them died/exited. I am curious to know how such a blooming ecosystem, that was embraced by the value is barely ever spoken of anymore, just the once off article or conversation here and there. Any large companies using RoR?Is this the fate of every programming language? If not, what went wrong? If so, what language is next and what might be the next hype?

Nextgrid · Accepted Answer

It's a mature product, it's stable and it works. Most problems have been solved. As a result there isn't much to talk about, therefore it gets drowned by less mature technologies which have yet to solve their problems and thus generate more press.
As for why startups don't use it, well it's a boring technology and boring technologies are bad if your objective is to justify hiring lots of engineers and build an engineering playground to justify all that VC money, so they go for something more fickle and fast-moving like JS or "serverless" instead.
Companies who use it exist (and even new ones), you don't hear about it much because they're too busy solving their business problem and making profit instead of messing around with tech and talking about it.

Tomte · Answer

People are still talking about Ruby on Rails, we have threads here on HN all the time, and the big companies using it are, as in the past, Basecamp/Hey/Once and Shopify.

gregjor · Answer

> Is this the fate of every programming language?
No. Some last a long time: Fortran, COBOL, C, C++, Java, C#, PHP, SQL, etc.
What doesn’t last is the hype and excitement once a language or tool becomes established and stable. Young programmers want to play with the shiny new thing.
> If not, what went wrong? If so, what language is next and what might be the next hype?
Who knows. Programming gets driven by fad and fashion, with little actual innovation. Waste of time to chase the hype.

Lio · Answer

1. Ruby on Rails is a framework and not a language.
2. This is a straw-man argument. The premise that Ruby on Rails is "barely spoken of" just isn't true.
Even a quick google will show that Ruby on Rails is still very popular and used by some of the biggest and most successful SaaS companies.
It may not be fashionable with polemics to say this, but Ruby and Ruby on Rails are both gaining new features and improving with every release.
If you want to put up a CRUD based SaaS today Ruby on Rails is better than it ever has been.