Will 2021 be any better for Ruby and ROR?

Has the world moved on really? That's what they thought in 2012, but what about now? Ruby's future is really a hot topic, even among its devs.

Our team has a lot of experienced Ruby on Rails developers. Some of them have been doing Ruby development for many years and know it like the back of their hand. This is why it takes us a lot of courage to admit – Ruby is not at its best right now.

The language was really popular in 2013-2015, but later on, it went on a decline. It’s even more drastic if we compare statistics of Ruby and Ruby on Rails demand 2020 to the progress, made by other tools. Stack Overflow made a pretty obvious comparison of Ruby’s and Node.js growth dynamics based on the number of asked questions. Yeah, it’s not the most objective metric, but you get the point.

Ruby development
Ruby’s user statistics dropped, but is it enough to declare Ruby’s death? Not really. If you listen to articles like “Ruby is Dead” or “Ruby is Irrelevant,” brace yourself – because each language of the framework has been pronounced dead at some point. Take Node.js – the runtime environment is living its good days – and yet people rush to announce the time of death.

is Ruby relevant
Hasty opinions about a decline in the tool are incredibly common in software development. We have seen already so many tools pronounced dead when it wasn’t even remotely true. All experienced developers know that stories about dying languages and frameworks are really, really popular.

Is Ruby on Rails dead 2020
Obviously, there’s no smoke without fire. Ruby is by no means perfect: the language has been given some reasons for developers to consider migration to different tools. Let’s take a look at the most common criticisms, thrown in Ruby and Ruby on Rails popularity 2020 and see if they have merit.

1. “Chaotic CPU consumption.” Ruby and Ruby on Rails’ CPU usage is known to reach high consumption numbers out of the blue. Developers run their typical processes, open activity monitors, and find out that CPU usage is at 50% or even 100%. Typically, these changes come with no context – developers don’t understand what they did wrong and have to kill the process.

Our commentary: Ruby doesn’t have the best relationship with CPU consumption. Usually, editing the configuration files and disabling useless background scanning processes is enough to reduce consumption. The problem often lies in code quality; our only complaint is the difficulty in locating these issues.

Ruby disadvantages

1. “Dynamic typing isn’t the definition of good code”. Dynamic typing in Ruby isn’t checked properly. Developers can make mistakes, produce unreadable code, and have no idea about it. Some think that Ruby codebases are tech debt magnets.

Ruby syntax
Our commentary: in Ruby, variables are dynamic: one word can refer to different values, and you can change it anytime. This is what makes Ruby one of the fastest languages to write with – so it’s not really a disadvantage. Ruby also has a great garbage collector that automatically detects technical issues and doesn’t require manual settings. Well-scaled successful projects that use Ruby are proof that Ruby can be very orderly.

1. “No growth curve”. It’s not that Ruby got terrible, it’s just that other languages got so much more powerful. JavaScript makes incredible quality leaps every year, while Ruby grows steadily but slowly. Ruby on Rails used to be a definite competitive advantage, but now, there are Rails-like frameworks in every language.

Our commentary: it’s true that Ruby on Rails inspired a lot of Node.js, JS, Python, and other frameworks.. As for updates, those who have been working on Ruby non-stop noticed the considerable improvements in speed and code quality. Ruby on Rails in 2020 is as fast as JS frameworks – we have an article where we explain it better.

Ruby and Ruby on Rails are a must for many development projects
Ruby is not a mainstream language, but it’s one of the most efficient ones. People don’t learn it for fun – they do it for work. Right now, it’s used by Airbnb, Hulu, GitHub, and many other big platforms. Here are some additional statistics on Ruby-based sites and their traffic loads.

Ruby on Rails 2020 ecosystem features one of the most popular communities on GitHub – over 3 500 contributors. To give you an idea, Django, one of the most popular Python framework, has only 1,500. So, the comparison of Ruby on Rails vs. Django 2020 shows that RoR is actually doing great.

Obviously, teams that work with Ruby don't need convincing that it's still alive and kicking. But if you are talking to a client or want to ace a job interview, you might want to pack some arguments up your sleeve.

Take a look at our suggestions (some are obvious, others - notso much)

1. Ruby development is fast and efficient At Syndicode, we use Ruby development for many reasons. For one thing, it’s fast to write – projects, written with Ruby take 30-40% less development time than with other languages. This is because you need 3-4 times less code lines than in Java or Python. The code is lightweight, and it contributes to better performance.

Earlier, Ruby had the reputation of being slow, but it can be solved with the right coding practice. We fully agree with the guide published by Shopify – writing fast code on Ruby is easy if you know how to do it.

1. Ruby code length Advantages of Ruby development for product owners The coding speed, fewer lines, and great frameworks – these all seem like development advantages. What about product quality and performance benefits? In our experience, Ruby has quite a lot to offer businesses.

• Fast time-to-market. Ruby on Rails is our go-to-choice for MVP development because it’s the only tool that allows achieving fast coding speed without compromising on quality.
• Flexibility. Because Ruby is so fast and easy to edit, making and publishing updates is an easy task. Developers can quickly release new features, introduce innovations to the market, and adapt to user needs.
• Ruby on rails popularity 2020: the ecosystem of Ruby on Rails framework easily tops most backend development frameworks, including Node and Python tools;
• A lot of free tools and libraries. There’s a large ecosystem of gems and Ruby and Ruby on Rails repositories: reusable code fragments that can be integrated into any project. *Cost-efficiency: with Ruby, you need to pay for 2-3 times fewer development language. This is because the syntax of the language is fast to write. Still, many features can be implemented with community-created ready-to-use code. *Cross-platform: code, written with Ruby, runs well on different devices and OSs, as well as different browsers. All our websites, SaaS, and marketplaces developed on Ruby performed flawlessly in a cross-platform environment.

But does it even make sense to defend Ruby right now? What are its best use cases?

In short, yes. MVP development and web development (in particular, big stuff like Amazon-style marketplaces) benefit from Ruby a ton. If you are interested take a look at my blog article that kinda sheds light on this https://syndicode.com/blog/why-is-ruby-still-our-choice-in-2020-2/