Yes! I was also surprised and a little bit agitated when I saw similar headlines on tech blogs and magazines few years back. I thought maybe that's right, I don't see much people learning Ruby On Rails these days neither I see much job posts for Rails developer position. Maybe I should learn django? Or maybe I should learn nodejs(express)? If you are also on your early stage of career, these questions must be itching your bones too. And especially, if Rails is the first framework you are working on, you must have been dealing with few more issues too.
For example, people say that Ruby/Rails ecosystem is not really the future because it does not have Machine Learning Capabilities and it is too slow. Some also say that Rails is not that scalable giving the example of Twitter. I also think to some degree that they are right. But should you be worried about it and start learning something else?
Actually you don't need to. If you are learning Rails then you must have shaped your future into being a web developer. So why should you even worry about Machine Learning when you are learning web development? You are worrying then, you are on the wrong path. If you really want to learn both then you can still learn it side by side. What really works according to my experience is that, Rails has the convention over configuration ideology that gives you the bird's eye overview of overall web development ecosystem which you can transfer to any another framework of choice.
A lot of technologies evolve over time but Rails has been there for a while now as a mature framework which has answers to most of the problems faced by web developers. So if you are learning/coding on Rails, then you don't need to worry now. These technologies that have been around for more than decade will take time to die.
Don't forget to share your thoughts too.
Happy Coding!
Oldest comments (48)
In any case Rails is a strong starting point for learning the MVC Architecture. I started with Rails and I had no trouble switching to Laravel for projects where it made more sense (mainly because of Laravel's ecosystem and Serverless capabilities). Still love Rails though and looking forward to use it again when I get the chance (especially Hotwire).
I don't think Rails is ever a bad choice ! But when you're a web developer you should stay open to other technologies and grow your arsenal so that you always have the right tool for the job at your disposal.
Hi Martin,
It was the same case for me I was having difficulty learning django at the beginning but it was fairly easy for me to pick up the Rails. Thank you so much for your comment
Rails is used as a learning tool on such a high percentage of boot camps. Definitely dead :p
haha! ya Rails is perfect for someone starting out to learn MVC and all
Last time I used it you'd need way more cloud resources than other platforms to serve the same number of users. The architecture seemed to just perform really poorly. I loved ruby but was so disappointed with the typesystem they developed. Having to put my types in a separate file is so wrong. I'll never use ruby again.
@insidewhy You are right too. For such cases Rails will be perfect for building MVP and prototypes.
How do you equate "resource hungry" and "terrible static typing system" with "perfect"? Heheh
Because you don't care about that when you're building an MVP, what matters is speed to market, code cleanliness and conciseness
But you probably wanna refactor your MVP rather than rewrite everything for your later releases, so maybe starting from rails isn't a great idea.
Really depends honestly. The decision you make for your product in the first years are rarely the right ones for your product of the years after that.
Rewriting will often happen no matter which language you choose once you really start to scale. You don't build an MVP in micro services running on a Kubernetes cluster, that's just over-engineering.
It's a common mistake, but what you think the direction is at the MVP step WILL NOT be the direction a few years after that.
Locking oneself into a specific techno is not good, choose the right ones for the right stages and evolve continuously instead of investing 3x the price in your solid future-proof MVP when 90% of products don't even reach that "future"
Yep of course, but choosing rails and coding in rails involves flexing a brain muscle that probably isn't worth flexing. Ruby was a lovely language but time hasn't been kind to it. Best off forgetting it now and solidifying better faster, more modern, easier and more flexible languages and frameworks in 2021.
Let's just agree to disagree 🤷 To me Rails is the definition of easy, you don't need to flex any muscle since everything is done for you, perfect for fast iteration ! I guess we just had different experiences with it, and that's ok, I don't think it's meant for everyone, just like MacOS's """Simplicity""" can turn off a lot of people (including me).
No matter how easy something is you're still "flexing". The more you use your brain on any task the more you remember how to do this kind of task and forget other types of task. So using ruby at all anymore is just a waste of thought and training that you could be using on something that actually has a future. Ruby is like an abusive relationship right now. It may feel good but it's letting you down, it's not doing a good job, and it's not going anywhere good. Leave it before it leaves you.
Ahaha I see what you mean, a bit dramatic but I get where you're coming from. I agree that Ruby is not objectively the best language to work on in terms of future (pretty good in terms of career though if you can go international, since there's so few of us and no competition, but only works for the next 10 years I guess).
If you like the Ruby syntax and ethos more than the other languages though, just go for it... Life is not always about optimization, it's about having fun as well ! And Ruby is definitely fun 🤡
If you want to optimize your career path like crazy and don't really have any preferences, by all means, go JS, Python, Rust and all that jazz ! I don't really need to optimize my career so I just focus on what I like doing and what makes me happy ☮
I really liked ruby too, until they really messed up building a type system. But it's not just about optimising for your career (although that is really important, money makes life easier), it's optimising your present and your future.
I love programming languages so much, and that's why I want to keep evolving, helping my career is just a byproduct of that.
I'm just disappointed the creators of ruby were so bad at evolving the language that it got trounced by things that came about much later. So much wasted promise. If you're enjoying hanging out on your sinking ship then by all means hang around for a bit longer, but don't fool yourself long enough that you drown with it.
You can't sink when you have a whole armada of boats 😎
There's no armada, just a waste of time and a waste of priorities: youtu.be/_F2k1zwDymw
You're pretty stubborn.. I was hinting at the fact that when you work with multiple programming languages, you're golden. No waste of time here
isrubydead.com
haha loved the idea of building website just to put NO
guthib.com
Ones of my favs that was put up by a former colleague of mine isperformantaword.com/
People who think Ruby can't serve machine learning use cases for one reason or another should be confused as to why Python is so strong in this arena. Python happens to have more of a culture and ecosystem built around these use-cases vs Ruby, but otherwise it should effectively have the same shortcomings as Ruby.
Ruby on Rails is robust in its webdev tooling and conventions. And generally it is popular enough that it essentially has everything you'd "expect" to use it for.
Happy to always emphasize that if you post on DEV, you're on Rails, and you can inspect every line of code we produce...
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wow! Thanks for your comment @ben !! inspecting code on DEV would be another way to learn more about Rails haha. Thanks for building this platform, it is always exciting to see the products built on tools we personally use day to day. Cheers!!
I'm not a fan of Rails, but ruby is far from dead and rails will live on for much the same reasons as WordPress and CodeIgniter, Django, Laravel, Spring boot and a host of other such systems.
I totally agree with you
What is the problem to have an application on rails and connected module with machine learning on python?
Rails is infinity scalable. It stateless. You can set up as many app servers as you want. Bottleneck is always a database, but this problem is outside of topic.
IMHO ruby is not good choice for first language to learn. Also applicable for Javascript, Python. I am convinced that the first language should be strongly typed, preferably with the ability to work directly with memory. It is like a math, you may not use it, but it shapes your thinking as a developer.
This is the kind of post I can get behind. I really dislike it when people say x technology is going to die or Y technology is worse than Z. I'm a polyglot Dev, and I've had the fortune of working in a ton of different domains; languages and other technologies should just be viewed as tools in your tool belt. Yeah sure, there are a few languages that work like hammers and a few that work like socket wrenches but that doesn't mean that one is better than the other; at least not from a general point of view.
I've actually been pretty impressed with the recent additions to Ruby. They added some pretty nice concurrency primitives, and the new compiler is much faster than it used to be. And while I would rarely pick rails for a new project, there certainly are usecases for both Ruby and rails. Also there's a good reason why recently we've been getting new languages that follow Ruby like syntaxes (crystal, nim and elixir for example). It's a nice syntax to work with.
Also if you learn Ruby, it's pretty easy to transition to a language like elixir or python, even something like rust shouldn't be too difficult to gork coming from a ruby background. It's perfectly acceptable for new programmers to get their feet wet with something like rails and there are still plenty of jobs out there looking for rails devs.
No, it's not true! you wrote this blog post on a platform created by Ruby on Rails!
@dev if I see one more manipulative or false or click bait title like this I wll stop comming back.
I saw on my evening news feed, this article, titled "Ruby on Rails will be dead soon!". I was saddened, really saddened; I clicked in to look for official announcements or commentaries on why the Rails team decided to make such a decision... What I got instead was just an unrelated person's meta-OPINION.
DEV is taglined "A constructive and inclusive social network for software developers. With you every step of your journey." I understand that the body of the article may serve some people, but I'm truly disgusted that it allowed such an article to have an unconstructive title that bites off so much more than it was meant to chew.
thats why you should't judge something too early 😅
Wow, so "will be dead soon!" has a different meaning if read slower? 😮
Post reported, goodbye.
Damn, the gem CLI is what I want, and if Ruby on Rails is dead, I can't use the gem CLI, which is my framework for Jekyll and Bundle.
don't worry Ruby is not going anywhere this early
Well, once it's gone how can I use the gem CLI? Are there any alternatives?
Homebrew is Ruby too, isn't it?
yes that's right! Homebrew is Ruby
If you want people to respect you, try not using silly click bait headlines like that.
haha the conclusion is ruby is not dead ✌️
Clickbait isn't cool. Get well soon
thanks 😅
COBOL will be dead soon
haha rich and dead