Survey Finds Only 3% of Ruby on Rails Developers Use Windows (rails-hosting.com) 71
This week saw the release of the 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results:
2,049 members of the Rails community from 92 countries kindly contributed their thoughts on tools, frameworks, and workflows in their day to day development lives. From these responses we hope to get an understanding of where Rails stands as a framework in 2020.
Some of these questions have been asked since our original survey over a decade ago, and show how the community has evolved over the last twelve years. Inside.com's developer newsletter summarized some of the results: - The typical Rails developer is self-taught, has been working with Rails 4-7 years, and works remotely...
- Rails developers overwhelmingly choose lightweight solutions like jQuery over larger frameworks.
- Most of the developers surveyed feel Rails is still relevant, although they were split on whether or not the Rails core team is moving in the right direction, with 48% totally agreeing with that sentiment.
According to the results, 24% of survey respondents primarily developing on Linux, while 73% used Mac OS X (leaving just 3% using Windows or "Other"). Yet the most popular editor was Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (used by 32% of respondents), followed by Vim-based editors (21%), Sublime (16%), RubyMine (15%), Atom (9%), Emacs (3%), and TextMate (2%).
The survey also asked the size of development teams for "your primary Rails application."
Some of these questions have been asked since our original survey over a decade ago, and show how the community has evolved over the last twelve years. Inside.com's developer newsletter summarized some of the results: - The typical Rails developer is self-taught, has been working with Rails 4-7 years, and works remotely...
- Rails developers overwhelmingly choose lightweight solutions like jQuery over larger frameworks.
- Most of the developers surveyed feel Rails is still relevant, although they were split on whether or not the Rails core team is moving in the right direction, with 48% totally agreeing with that sentiment.
According to the results, 24% of survey respondents primarily developing on Linux, while 73% used Mac OS X (leaving just 3% using Windows or "Other"). Yet the most popular editor was Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (used by 32% of respondents), followed by Vim-based editors (21%), Sublime (16%), RubyMine (15%), Atom (9%), Emacs (3%), and TextMate (2%).
The survey also asked the size of development teams for "your primary Rails application."
- A team of one - 17%
- Two to four - 35%
- Five to eight - 19%
- Eight to 15 - 13%
- 16 to 25 - 6%
- 25-50 - 5%
- 50-plus - 5%
Meanwhile, in a recent talk, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto confirmed that Ruby 3 will finally be released this Christmas, December 25, bringing a new pattern-matching syntax, right-hand-side variable assignment, and numbered block parameters.
He also promised improvements to help make Ruby more fast, more concurrent, and more correct. (Though "We don't pursue completeness nor soundness of the type systems, because, you know, Ruby is Ruby. Ruby is basically dynamically typed...")
Interesting (Score:4)
73% use macOS, eh?
I thought the conventional Slashdot meme was that macOS and Macs made for a terrible Development Platform?
Guess not!
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Netcraft says Ruby is dying... (Score:1)
That 3% is because 97% of Ruby developers are dead already.
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Re: Interesting (Score:2)
Most companies are Windows or Mac. Mac is Unix (Score:5, Insightful)
In most corporations, your choice of desktop is Windows or Mac. Windows is - well, Windows, while Mac is Unix with a pretty UI also included.
Given the choice, I choose Unix, and I don't mind the Mac GUI.
It works fine for launching terminals, a web browser, and reading email.
Btw Mac isn't Unix-like, the way Linux is. Mac is actual certified Unix (tm). Meaning it's more Unix than Linux or FreeBSD are. Don't let the UI fool you, that UI runs on real-deal Unix.
So yeah for dev (and I've been doing dev for 20 years), I definitely choose Mac (Unix) over Windows.
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The lack of a sensible way to install packages seems to be the biggest downside to OS X. Brew? Really? Every mainstream Linux distro does better than brew.
And the whole opinionated-ness of the system feels like being dictated to by an idiot boss rather than getting to choose how you want to use your computer. Linux and BSD come with loads of options to setup your window manager and system exactly how you like.
And the updates. "Screw you, I'm updating for 4 minutes and it might take all day". On any linux di
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I use Homebrew and I use MacPorts, sometimes on the same systems. Homebrew is typically more up to date than MacPorts. It is also more convenient to use than MacPorts because it lets you install packages without sudo, but the downside to that is that it's not multi-user-friendly because the current user either owns or needs to own the entire /usr/local hierarchy so in the multi-user case you need something to chown/chmod that hierarchy which brings you right back to sudo.
I'd say if you're on a single-user s
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And cupsd? What a piece of shit. No thanks.
Blame Apple for that one. They wrote it.
Re: Most companies are Windows or Mac. Mac is Unix (Score:2)
Re: Most companies are Windows or Mac. Mac is Unix (Score:2)
Much like unix of yesteryear, macOS is so specialized that it is guaranteed to dies the moment apple does.
So, in other words, about the same time as the Sun becomes a Red Giant, right?
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So I could buy a really crappy lap-burning Dell notebook that will last for 8-16 months with a 14-pound power brick and be horrible to use until it dies and becomes yet-more-e-waste, or I could buy a Mac notebook for $5000 and use it happily for a decade. Easy choice.
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Windows is - well, Windows
That's not a very specific criticism of Windows. Yes, of course it is "Windows." Windows has strengths and weaknesses, as does Linux and Mac OS. What weaknesses of Windows, specifically, make you feel it is inferior?
In some ways, the Mac OS GUI has remained behind the curve. The menu bar being stuck at the top of the screen, for example, causes it to be visually detached from the window the user is interacting with.
Regardless of preferences, the most important advantage of Windows is that nearly all softwar
Re:Most companies are Windows or Mac. Mac is Unix (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows is its own thing. Most Linux and Unix software will work on a Mac. Some of it will work on Windows, but it's mostly an afterthought.
Yes, it's ironic. If you want to use GUI stuff, Windows is your go to, and maybe it will work on Mac too. If it's command line or scientific, it's the reverse.
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I agree with you there! Windows has an edge when it comes to GUI, Linux and Mac have an edge on the command line. Unfortunately, most average people out there don't use command lines. Fortunately, Windows now has bash built in, and Microsoft is working to integrate it even further.
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Windows's GUI makes me want to gouge my eyes out. I can't exactly pinpoint it, but frankly the way it keeps adding Candy Crush Saga to the menu after i delete it is, uh, representative.
I acknowledge that it's not a complete degenerate clusterfuck like Gnome, but idk it's still just so damn tacky. I really do like the spare simplicity of Mac OS; most of the customization options in Windows or Gnome/KDE are superficial crap anyway.
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I find it to be the case that most Windows-haters don't really know why they hate it.
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it's about a decade that window resizing has been around; you need new material.
yes, finder has problems but fewer than the others in that it doesn't consistently outright break or push advertised garbage at me.
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> That's not a very specific criticism of Windows. Yes, of course it is "Windows."
It's interesting - I just said Windows, and you understood that as a criticism. Funny, you sure knew that "Windows" isn't a positive thing, didn't you. You can choose whichever top 50 let of bad things about Windows you want - clearly you've decided it's bad, even as you wish to defend it.
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You clearly underestimate the amount of Microsoft-hate on this site. I personally don't have a problem with Windows. I think it's a great OS with lots of robust features. But I know that many slashdotters are either Apple fanboys, or waiting for the "year of the Linux desktop."
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Well, if they're waiting in the year of the Linux desktop, they should look in their hand. The desktop shrank about 15 years ago. Surprise, neither KDE nor Gnome won, becoming the dominant UI environment.
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There are reasons every serious cloud has more Linux than Windows guests, including Microsoft's own cloud.
Windows is a GUI-first system pushed well beyond its design. It's insecure by design, unreliable by design, expensive, and hard to program to due to Microsoft's abuse of standards. It's hard to manage due to poor design decisions and due to Microsoft's workarounds to those poor design decisions. It's not a serious OS contender, it's the OS that gets forced in by buying off senior management or buying of
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The reason cloud systems run Linux is simple. On servers, you don't need a GUI, so Linux is sufficient. And most importantly, Linux does not come with licensing fees. When you are standing up thousands of servers, license fees make a huge difference.
Corporations choose Windows servers for one major reason: Support. They WANT to have the contract that says Microsoft will give them support when something goes wrong. AND they like all the little security and permissions-related settings that give corporate IT
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Linux distros had support for a very long time. The argument that only Microsoft has support is plain wrong.
Have you ever needed Microsoft's support? I remember being up all night during a global incident involving global cascade failures of active directory servers. Microsoft support did try but they were essentially useless in the face of their own badly written software. Have you tried support for Azure? I have. They read a script and have no access to your environment. It takes a hell of a lot of pushin
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Oh, I didn't say that the quality of Microsoft support was GOOD, just that it's corporate-friendly. Corporations want those fancy contracts that nobody can read except the lawyers.
As someone who has worked with both Microsoft SQL Server and Postgres and SQLite and ElasticSearch, I know that Linux databases are NOT easier to use, nor do they have the same power to scale to extremely large sizes.
You didn't mention control. This is very important to corporate bosses--having the ability to control things like w
Re:Most companies are Windows or Mac. Mac is Unix (Score:4, Interesting)
> more Unix than Linux or FreeBSD
Overrated, considering things like SunOS/Solaris were unusable without gnu binutils, which gave you a tar that has -z and a cp that has -a
MacOS: readlink is still missing -f, doesn't come with realpath or openssl or a recent version of bash. If you brew install openssl, it has zero CA certs. The list goes on.
Not sure how that being "more Unix" is a good thing.
> 20 years
Not impressive if you are looking for Unix cred.
That said, I use MacOS every day, but not because it is "real Unix".
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I have a license plate that I bought from the Open Group about 20 years ago. It is a vanity 'UNIX' plate that duplicates an old in-joke from historical unix. Get it? It was a unix license from back before AT&T would sell unix licenses.
Anything the Open Group allows can bear the UNIX trademark that they own. Apple licensed the term quite awhile ago.
MacOS has a withered ill-maintained userland that was ported over from FreeBSD a long while ago. It does not at all have a unix kernel.
Re: Most companies are Windows or Mac. Mac is Unix (Score:2)
Theres no such thing as a "unix kernel", they're all unique. Unix is a set of functionality and behaviour not a specific kernel design
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You are talking about the posix standards. Which don't rely on unix, there is a posix-compliant subsystem to run on the Windows NT kernel.
The unix kernel is documented in Lion's commentary [amazon.com] and is an actual big chunk of code.
The BSD kernels are the closest modern approximation.
Apple uses a microkernel that they got when Apple was acquired by NeXT (because Apple had proven incapable of producing their own next generation OS).
Re: Most companies are Windows or Mac. Mac is Uni (Score:2)
You've contradicted your own argument. I'll let you figure out where.
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POSIX isn't unix. Non-unix operating systems are posix compliant. That doesn't mean there isn't a unix kernel from a common code base. It means that Apple's Mac OS can be posix compliant and pay the Open Group for permission to carry the unix trademark, but so can Windows NT.
There was an Interix POSIX subsystem for Windows NT when Apple was still poking around with their cooperative 'multitasking' nightmare.
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The Single Unix Specification is mostly about portability, about "you can compile and run any Unix software on any Unix system"; it doesn't require "install the latest version by default".
A newer bash might be a good thing, but that's not what makes it a Unix system..Windows has a fairly current bash - that doesn't make it Unix. That's just Windows running bash.
> It's a way easier to the actual Unix tools in modern versions in any Linux distro then in Mac
Funny you should say that. The main reason that
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I thought the conventional Slashdot meme was that macOS and Macs made for a terrible Development Platform?
You're wrong, there is no such "conventional wisdom". The conventional wisdom is that you work with the tools and hand, and you build a toolkit that is as environment agnostic as possible.
Guess not!
The real issue here is whether Ruby works well on Windows. If, as I expect, it doesn't, if the library support is poor and if you have to waste your own time to get it to work, you basically have two options.
One is to ditch the platform it doesn't work well on (and the potential income from it), which might be a reasonable
Re: Interesting (Score:2)
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What would you do with a language that has poor quality libraries? You may as well program with copy con program.exe.
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I thought the conventional Slashdot meme was that macOS and Macs made for a terrible Development Platform
Congratulations, if you thought that saying 73% of Ruby on Rails developers use Macs was a vote in favour of macs, then you obviously missed the point. Any percentage of Ruby on Rails developers using Macs is like saying that 73% of FORTH programmers use a TI 99/4a. Ya. I'm going to go right out and get me one now!!!
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I though that FORTH hackers spent their time coding on the open firmware on old SPARCstations. And on beige G3 Power Macs.
Macs based on Unix. (Score:2)
73% use macOS, eh? I thought the conventional Slashdot meme was that macOS and Macs made for a terrible Development Platform? Guess not!
Why would they not be, they are after all based on unix? Most of the so-called Linux apps and toolchains are really *nix apps and toolchains. Very little is Linux specific and the vast majority runs fine on a Mac. As it now does under Windows too via the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
One no longer has to give up consumer software to get the *nix tools and toolchain.
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I strongly prefer linux over mac, but if your employer gives you a mac and tells you that using your own laptop isn't an option then you use a mac.
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I have done Python, Ruby, and now Elixir development for over 20 years, collectively, and for me, macOS is the best development platform because it is Unix AND supports commercial software, like Adobe products, which are necessary for really doing full-stack web development. I would never use Windows for anything but gaming. Unless you're doing .NET programming (and who would?) Windows is a terrible development platform.
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73% use macOS, eh?
I thought the conventional Slashdot meme was that macOS and Macs made for a terrible Development Platform?
Guess not!
These are Ruby developers we're talking about, so I don't think this really disproves anything :)
Re: Interesting (Score:2)
AFAIK, Ruby comes pre-installed on Macs. While that certainly isn't the only reason, I bet it has an effect.
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Without hacks, Rails can't run on Windows (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Without hacks, Rails can't run on Windows (Score:2)
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I've used ruby on Windows as part of the ChefDK. Horridly slow. I think it's due to ruby's file access pattern combined with anti-virus in Windows getting in front of every one of those little accesses, slows it to a painful crawl.
Re: Without hacks, Rails can't run on Windows (Score:2)
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At that point, i'd just dual boot between windows and linux.
Though, was this using the linux subsystem for windows? I've always wondered if it was worth using but never tried since dual booting solved that with a fuss.
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Re: Without hacks, Rails can't run on Windows (Score:2)
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Windows-incompatible, never-ever-worked-on-Windows libraries
I find this to be true not just for Rails, but for most modern web-development tools and packages. I encountered this phenomenon when developing SAAS on Windows: Only the most mainstream widely-accepted packages are ever ported to Windows. Most 3rd party libraries are either never ported, or the ports are considered incomplete and unstable. Moreover, I looked through the most successful web companies/products, and they are 100% NOT USING WINDOWS. Yes, I am as shocked as you are, but based on your quote I am
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Trying to run Ruby natively on Windows is an exercise in frustration. Trying to run multiple versions will drive you mad.
The only ways to usefully run it are to use VMs / WSL / dual boot, which of course means you're not running it natively on Windows...
Re: Without hacks, Rails can't run on Windows (Score:2)
Survey finds (Score:2)
Only 0.0003% of Windows users develop with Ruby on Rails.
The other 97% ... (Score:2)
... don't know what the shit that even means and stuff.
most surveyed feel Rails is still relevant (Score:1)
Re: most surveyed feel Rails is still relevant (Score:2)
Windows editor (Score:1)
Numbers (Score:2)
This isn't news. (Score:2)
Almost nobody developing with FOSS technologies uses Windows unless they must for some oddball reason like company policy. The web/app hippsters still use OS X a lot, everyone else uses x86 Linux or - if they are super-hip - a simple slim cheap and light chromebook with all the development done with VIM on some fat server they've rented.