DEV Community

Discussion on: What's the state of Ruby? Is it trending down for good or just settling in to a mature niche role?

Collapse
 
ess profile image
Dennis Walters

Disregarding trendiness for a sec, I see Ruby's future as exactly the same as its present and past. For me, that means it involves some combination of these ideas:

  • It's a wonderful language in which to write software
  • It's my go-to for getting MVPs out the door
  • It's the method by which I configure servers (because Chef)
  • Regardless of the end product, all of my projects start with Ruby
  • Boy, there sure is a lot of legacy code out there that needs maintained

If one's income depends on Ruby, the downward trend is somewhat similar to the usage of other once popular programming languages, and it generally means good things for individuals with deep knowledge of those languages. In short, COBOL and RPG haven't gone anywhere (regardless of how much we'd like for them to disappear), and practitioners tend to make pretty decent bank in fairly secure roles.