Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Ruby Programming

Is Ruby On Rails Losing Steam? 291

itwbennett writes: In a post last week, Quartz ranked the most valuable programming skills, based on job listing data from Burning Glass and the Brookings Institution. Ruby on Rails came out on top, with an average salary of $109,460. And that may have been true in the first quarter of 2013 when the data was collected, but "before you run out and buy Ruby on Rails for Dummies, you might want to consider some other data which indicate that Rails (and Ruby) usage is not trending upwards," writes Phil Johnson. He looked at recent trends in the usage of Ruby (as a proxy for Rails usage) across MS Gooroo, the TIOBE index, the PYPL index, Redmonk's language rankings, and GitHut and found that "demand by U.S. employers for engineers with Rails skills has been on the decline, at least for the last year."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Is Ruby On Rails Losing Steam?

Comments Filter:
  • by EMG at MU ( 1194965 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @11:09AM (#48467227)
    Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.
    • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @11:43AM (#48467509)

      Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.

      We can cram the internet boom, a dot-com bubble, a dot-com crash, 9/11, the birth of DHS, and a rather massive banking failure that almost crashed the entire global economy inside a span of 10 years.

      With factors like that going on all around your number, I'm not quite sure what value you can expect out of your salary stats. The only thing we've managed to sustain over the last 10 years is chaos. IT is hardly immune.

      • by jambox ( 1015589 )
        Come now, it's not as if that will ever happen again...

        "Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rainforest scare a few years back: our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?"
      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        With factors like that going on all around your number, I'm not quite sure what value you can expect out of your salary stats

        Software developers who don't work on web UI frontend stuff: infrastructure and systems programmers, kernel developers, and so on, were barely affected by all that. 2007-08 was rough for everyone, but even then it wasn't that bad for us backend devs.

        Now, if your expertise was DB internals, hard cluster internals, or user-mode storage software, those fields have gradually faded over the past decade, but many of us just moved on to the new hotness: the backend for the cloud, and massively parallel systems th

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      You are like that farmer that whines when they get paid bugger all for a crop that raked in huge profits for the few farmers that planted it last season, just like all the other farmers that switched to the high profit crop.

      Demand does not function on it's off but is a partner with supply. When supply fails to meet demand, price rises and when supply exceeds demand price drops. There was an interesting period where old cobol programmers were paid heaps, not because there was growing demand but because no

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @11:11AM (#48467239)

    Whether or not you believe it was the world's most hipster programming language, they tried to sell it as a license to print money. And it is so clearly not. All the businesses with any real money either roll their own languages for in-house challenges, opt for something off the shelf and easy to recruit for, or have mountains of legacy code that merely needs to be maintained.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @11:40AM (#48467469)

      Why is the parent modded down?

      It's a very accurate description of real world Ruby on Rails apps.

      Many adopters have been badly burned by this software, and the people who pushed it.

      Failed projects, slow and broken apps, and fleeing developers are the hallmarks of Ruby on Rails.

      It's much worse than Java was in the early 2000s, or C++ in the 1990s, or C and COBOL before that.

      Ruby on Rails sounds great, until you try to use an app written in it, or worse, until you have to deal with a Rubyist. Then everything tends to go to hell.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Normal people, including programmers, just got tired of dealing with the Ruby crowd. No normal person wants to deal with smug, "opinionated", Zed Shaw-inspired hipsters who swear all the time, and who also often exhibit an unusual disdain for women. It's even worse when, despite all their talk and hype about how great Ruby and Rails are, they still wrote worse software than the well-mannered and normal PHP, Java and Python programmers.

      • Indeed. I always found it entertaining to see what was going on in Ruby-land: concepts from 20-30 years ago that other languages had explored (and often discarded having discovered major issues with them) being touted as new and shiny and one of the reasons why Ruby is great. Rails itself is something of an example of this: NeXT's WebObjects (of which there's been an open source reimplementation in the form of GNUstepWeb since the mid '90s) had a very similar model and was the first (or possibly second, d
      • I don't think I've ever heard of Zed talking about how great Ruby on Rails is.

        http://harmful.cat-v.org/softw... [cat-v.org]

  • Just wondering what the new darling programing language is.
    • Will be released in 2015 [fosdem.org]... just sayin'.
    • Just wondering what the new darling programing language is.

      Python + Javascript, or just Javascript (via node.js or similar). Everyone is trying to make a Javascript framework. Everyone is trying to find the good parts of Javascript.

  • by Dishwasha ( 125561 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @11:22AM (#48467323)

    I spend more of my time writing javascript/coffeescript than Ruby.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    For now at least, Chef seems to be the primary mover/shaker of Ruby-related stuff that I'm seeing anymore, otherwise I just don't encounter it at all.

    Node? Check.
    PHP? Forever.
    Python? Sometimes.
    PERL? Yes, I see this more than Ruby.

    I'm just not seeing any new deployments of Ruby-based systems outside of Chef to manage those, and even there it's very minimal use of Ruby itself since most stuff is in templates and the like and not truly 'coding' in Ruby.

    • by Bigbutt ( 65939 )

      Yea, we're evaluating config management tools and have excluded puppet and chef specifically because it requires a ruby instance.

      [John]

      • Wow. The core of Chef is Erlang which allows modules to load in ruby,perl, python or whatever you want. The client is in ruby.

        Excluding the top tools on the market because of zealotry against the language? Wow.

        • by Bigbutt ( 65939 )

          Not zealotry. I'm not a fan of having to install extra software such as Ruby or other agents on every server. If I can't manage every server with the tool, then I continue using what I do now or look for a tool that doesn't need an agent. Heck, security requirements make installing extra software a bear due to dependencies. I have to manually install and chase down the additional packages. We have quite a few older systems which don't support these agents, even cfengine. So having an agentless tool to do co

          • Well, you do not "have to install extra software on every server", you can have Chef or Puppet or even Ansible do that for you. While you're sipping your coffee and watch it run :)

            • Yeah, but using tools to that level requires reading manuals, and finding out what the features are before you decide if you hate it or not. It is so much simpler to just learn one way of doing things, and then muddle through with it forever, and install crap on servers by hand. Sure, it takes more work and doesn't scale, but it doesn't require more than one learning cycle per 3 decades. So there will always be a contingent that promote this way, and try to find ways of making themselves sound like Very Ser

        • The chef server is in Erlang, of course the chef server doesn't do very much but auth hosts and server files. the client does pretty much everything.

      • It actually packages it's own embedded ruby instance, and if you excluding ruby and by extension Vagrant you really are missing out.

  • by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @11:33AM (#48467417) Homepage

    Clients care about hosting costs. Clients care about employment costs. Ruby is not enough slower than most other stuff to matter to a good coder, but most employers avoid actually hiring coders who are that good; they're too expensive and too hard to hold onto, and badly written Ruby is easily MUCH slower than badly written [anything else] for a number of circumstantial reasons. Hence, employers see Ruby as too expensive.

    But a lot of this is definitely reinforced by hype.

    • The thing is, if you assume the exact same idiots actually get hired either way, their bad Ruby isn't any worse than their bad PHP would be. So that is not different enough to matter in the evaluation. Good try though, it was almost coherent.

      • True. But bad Node.js code is faster than bad Ruby code. Will probably have even more bugs in it, though, because of the limitations present in both Javascript and Node.js.

  • It's called a fad.
  • David Heinemeier Hansson was sick of PHP, found Ruby, and invented Rails in 2004. No mention is made of him toying with Python. I think that if he had found Python that he would have liked it just as much. Django had not come out though.

    I guess that he did the best he could with what he had, but I wonder if he would he would have just switched from PHP to Django had he started five years later.

    • by tomhath ( 637240 )
      Every few years someone realizes they can query the database schema and generate CRUD forms. I never understood why Rails became popular, it was the same old approach with the same old inherent shortcomings - mostly that management thinks you have 80% of the application written in a couple of hours, when in fact you have almost nothing with any business value that a database IDE like PhpMyAdmin doesn't give you.
      • by jbolden ( 176878 )

        J2EE became popular because it answered the question in a reasonable way of how to handle state for web application development. Rails became popular because it offered a way to do 80% of what J2EE allowed at 20% of the development time and complexity.

        • Of course, Java hasn't stood still, nor have the people that write libraries for it.

          Hell, I want to say the Java + Spring + Hibernate stack even existed before RoR did.

          Thanks to advances over the years, you can now write Spring applications using no XML. Short example [spring.io] (the longer example guide seems to have gone MIA on the Spring Guides [spring.io] site).

          Although I'd hope you'd be using your web server/servlet container's database setup stuff (including connection pooling) rather than hard-coding it into the app.

          • No, Java was very heavily influenced by RoR. Before DHH said "Screw Java" J2EE was a seriously bad, complex mess. After lots of people went to RoR because it is such a PITA to write J2Ee (I was one) a lot of simplyfying went into J2EE which improved it.

    • David Heinemeier Hansson was sick of PHP, found Ruby, and invented Rails in 2004. No mention is made of him toying with Python. I think that if he had found Python that he would have liked it just as much. Django had not come out though.

      I guess that he did the best he could with what he had, but I wonder if he would he would have just switched from PHP to Django had he started five years later.

      The Rails crew knows the Django crew and vice-versa from the very beginning. They're basically drinking-buddies.
      Rai

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @11:53AM (#48467571)

    Rails never had 'steam'. (I supose you mean something else than that digi-distro-channel by Valve)

    Rails was and is a fad - plain and simple.

    Every haphazard PHP project runs circles around it - for the simple fact that deploying PHP is dead simple, whereas with Rails it's a major PITA. Rails was discovered and hijacked/promoted by the Java community - and while they were all happy and gleeful about the lightweight convention-over-configuration approach they didn't know until then - the Rails & Ruby community bloated Rails beyond repair big-time-Java-style with libs, extensions, mandatory deployment systems that only a very small minority really needs, etc. Rails ran into walls in the real world and the abysmal arrogance of its community scared n00bs away.

    The truth is, nobody needs rails. PHP and its big frameworks are faster and easyer to develop for, both PHPs and Pythons communities are way more n00by friendly and for people who need something big, easy and scalable there's projects like Plone (Python) or Typo3 Neos (PHP) for massive non-trivial installments, each with hundreds of active developers to back them.

    The only thing that Rails had going for it was a website that didn't look like shit - back in a time when most FOSS websites mostly *did* look like shit - and the brand-new concept of screencasts to show of scaffolding and code-generation. That has changed thankfully, throughout the FOSS community. Scaffolding - definitely not a first with Rails - is now well know as a concept and commonplace. And the FOSS projects are finally aware that marketing, including websites that don't suck, is important. That's the overall improvement that Rails brought along.

    But right now Rails as a FW is way to bloated, unwieldy and buggy to be of any use for a web-project beyond enthusiasts fiddling with it. I have yet to get a Rails environment running on my laptop for local development. With PHP its download MAMP, XAMPP or "apt-get install mod-php" and start progging.

    So, yeah, no steam, only hot air.
    And, yes, from what I can tell, the hypes been over since about 2 years.

    My 2 cents.

    • by xaxa ( 988988 )

      Rails never had 'steam'. (I supose you mean something else than that digi-distro-channel by Valve)

      A steam locomotive. When it runs out of steam, it stops. (Wording chosen for the pun with Rails.)

    • I agree that Rails is a fad. But touting PHP as better is... odd. PHP is a dismal language, with horrible coding practices and duplicate commands (some are bad, some are good, who knows which is which). Using a library, you have no idea what code they used... did they use the old string routine that's vulnerable to buffer overflows, or the new one? Why does PHP even KEEP the broken commands, it's insane!

      Ruby is good (despite performance issues), PHP is bad [eev.ee]. I'll take any framework built around Ruby over a

    • Rails has been out for 10 years. You keep using this word "fad" but I'm not sure it means what you think it means.

      • Disco and bell-bottoms were both around for more than 10 years. They are all still a widely-used examples of fads. Methinks you don't understand what fad means.

  • I still would find myself hard pressed to select a language and framework that would get a vanilla CRUD based site or backend up and running as quickly as one can with RoR.

    Python/Django is heading there but I find Python to be less productive as a language and I've shot myself in the foot a few times due to whitespace issues (especially when refactoring). MS languages are a no-no until they bite the bullet and officially support *nix based system; Java ... shoot me; Scala .. shoot me twice! (and then once m

  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @02:31PM (#48469173) Homepage Journal

    Specifically: the demand curve half of the equation. The other half is the supply curve. A platform can have *no steam whatsoever*, but so few programmers that the salaries are reasonably high.

    Consider Delphi programming. I see Delphi positions come up once in a blue moon -- it's not used much any longer. But those salaries run from $80K to $110K plus. Sometimes you see a Delphi position come up in the mid 40s, but I suspect they're government positions.

    I've seen listings for COBOL or PoweBuilder programmers both in the $60K to $110K plus range. You can bet when a company offers $110K for a PowerBuilder programmer it's because it's having a hard time finding one.

    • I see Delphi positions come up once in a blue moon -- it's not used much any longer. But those salaries run from $80K to $110K plus.

      $110K doesn't seem like a good salary for a programmer to me, but in some regions maybe it is.

  • *puts on sunglasses* It's gone off the rails
  • The true index of programming languages, Tiobe, ranks Ruby at 14 and going down. If you're a ruby dev and making that kind of coin... bravo, stash it as your days are numbered. If you're looking for a new language to learn, look else where. I've been a php dev and found attempting to use Ruby an unpractical PITA. It just sucked.

Wherever you go...There you are. - Buckaroo Banzai

Working...