Aaron’s still at it, fixing bugs in bundler, nokogiri and maybe still teaching even. I’ve stopped using MRI because the toolchain and ecosystem aren’t conducive to economical scaling or profiling like C or JVM. JRuby is much easier to profile using JMX, but it’s harder to get native extensions going and not the same. For backend, lately I’ve been more in the Elixir/Erlang, Rust and Go camps for solutions.
Depends on what you mean by the roadmap, but TruffleRuby looks very promising. I haven't used Ruby in years, but if I did return to it TruffleRuby would be the first thing I'd explore using.
When Apple had some interest in Ruby and things like RubyMotion started to appear, I thought maybe the Dylan lessons would be of inspiration, but it was in vain.
May be there are lots more people interested in TruffleRuby then MRI.
And that is because people like you, manage to optimize some voodoo Ruby metaprogramming, which many previously thought were impossible, into real fast binary with an experimental; high potential AOT compiler and toolkit called Graal and Truffle. If that is not exiting for any geeks I dont know what is.
If Ruby had an interesting topic title, I assume anyone would vote the post before even reading it. At least that is what I think majority of people would do. They dont vote on the content, they vote on the title.
So the number of vote has some relationship to how many people within the HN community are still interested in Ruby. Late last year we started to see Ruby post with enough vote for the front page, but not enough comment at all. This year there aren't even enough vote for anything Ruby to arrive on the front page.
Maybe a lot of posts about Ruby now go to www.rubyflow.com...? I think this is a _really bad_ thing because by segregating all things Ruby, people on the outside perceive that Ruby is no longer relevant.
Some people say that Ruby is more popular now than ever. But if we don't see anyone talking about it on HN, it gives the impression that no thought-leaders are interested in it and that it's not worth learning.
I love Ruby, its community, and the community's values. I want to keep using Ruby for new projects, and not just for web apps. I've used SciRuby's dataframes, and I've also used Ruby to control LED lighting for side projects. But I also wish more people were doing more things with it.
When we were reviewing which stack to consolidate our development on we considered Ruby/RoR/Chef/Puppet, but all the weirdness of RVM and 32/64bit trouble, plus Python seemed to have better support on Windows, so we went with Python/Django/Ansible.
We love Ruby too, but being on one platform has been hugely helpful for us.
We just had the largest ever European Ruby Conference. Ruby has fallen off the Hacker News hype list, but it's far from dying, let alone dead. At 24 years old it's simply matured.
The startup I work for is all about Ruby, we use it for all sorts of things from microservices, CLIs, Docker scheduling and everything in between. As a newer Rubyist (and long time C++ and C# dev) I get the feeling the Ruby community is a bit stagnant. Most Gems I use seem to have peaked on GitHub activity a few years ago and are now just sort of chilling. Of course this doesn't mean the language is dying or anything, but it does feel like I'm joining a party after everyone went home.
It may not be popular in Hacker News but people still use Ruby for lots of different things. And even in the web development camp there's life outside Rails. Hanami has been getting a lot of traction lately.
Rails is still moving forward, though. I think it's the first major web framework (outside of the Node.js ecosystem) to offer official webpack support.
Since you had to make a throwaway for that comment, I'm not convinced it's a concern you really had nor that you work at a place that can't even give you the modest amount of doubt-benefit to click the URL before calling you into the office for a chat.
If your workplace uses Ruby, people there should probably be familiar with Aaron Patterson (AKA tenderlove). He's been a prominent Rubyist since Rubyists had any prominence.
