📰 Whatever Happened to the Ruby Programming Language?

Three years after Rails was introduced in 2005, InfoWorld asked whether it might the successor to Java. That didn't happen. So this week InfoWorld "spoke to current and former Ruby programmers to try to trace the language's rise and fall." Some responses: "Rails came along at the cusp of a period of transformation and growth for the web," says Matthew Boeh, a Ruby developer since 2006. "It both benefited from and fueled that growth, but it was a foregone conclusion that it wasn't going to be the only success story." Boeh recently took a job as a senior staff software engineer at Lattice, a TypeScript shop. "You could say that Ruby has been a victim of its own success, in that its community was a major driving force in the command-line renaissance of recent years," he says. "In the early '00s it was introducing REPL-driven development to people who had never heard of Lisp, package management to people who would have been scared off by Perl's CPAN, test-driven development to people outside the highly corporate Java world, and so on. This is all stuff that is considered table stakes today. Ruby didn't originate any of it, but it was all popularized and made accessible by Rubyists...." "The JavaScript ecosystem in its current form would have been unimaginable in 2004 — it needed both the command line renaissance and the takeoff of the web platform," adds Lattice's Boeh. "Did you know it took a full decade, 1999 to 2009, to release a single new version of the JavaScript standard? We get one yearly now. Rails became a big deal in the very last time period where it was possible to be a full-stack developer without knowing JavaScript...." [W]hen it comes to data science, Python has a leg up because of the ready availability of libraries like TensorFlow and Keras. "These frameworks make it easy for coders to build data visualizations and write programs for machine learning," says Pulkit Bhardwaj, e-commerce coach at BoutiqueSetup.net. JavaScript, meanwhile, has spawned seemingly endless libraries that developers can easily download and adapt for just about any purpose. "As a technologist, you can go on your own hero's journey following whatever niche thing you think is the right way to go," says Trowbridge. But when it comes to JavaScript, "these libraries are excellent. Why ignore all of that?" Many of those libraries were developed by community members, which inspired others to contribute in a snowball effect familiar to anyone involved in open source. But one big player has had an outsized influence here. Python's TensorFlow, which Bhardwaj called a "game-changer," was released by Google, which has followed academia's lead and made Python its internal scripting language. Google, as the maker of the dominant web browser, also has an obvious interest in boosting JavaScript, and Trowbridge gives Google much of the credit for making JavaScript much faster and more memory efficient than it once was: "In some ways it feels almost like a low level language," he says. Meanwhile, Ruby is widely acknowledged to be lagging in performance, in part because it lacks the same sort of corporate sponsor with resources for improving it.

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