They're not rare. I know a ton and many still write Ruby. Willingness to work on brownfield Ruby projects is rare; as with other similar systems like Django or roll-your-own Express stuff, such systems strongly tend towards chaos and a lack of maintainability after a certain point if they haven’t already had strong leadership end-to-end. In my neck of the woods, the folks who you want doing that work don't want to do that work anymore. Unless you pay a lot.
> Willingness to work on brownfield Ruby projects is rare
After working in a dev agency that took on outside Rails projects several times while I was there, my conclusion is that Rails (not the only way to write even Web-focused Ruby, and not the only one I've used, but the only one that'll score you any points for hiring) is a pretty bad framework for any project that will have multiple teams on it over its lifetime, absent heroic technical direction & testing efforts that I've never actually seen in the wild—probably because young or outsourced teams picking Rails are doing it to move fast, over all other concerns.
You can take on or resurrect an average outside or old Rails projects. It's just slow and expensive.
Too much magic, too much room for doing things some way that the next person will never have seen before, too little grep-ability, too hard for your tools to help you.
Agreed in full. I don't love Rails, either; I always used https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby (which I almost definitionally like, 'cause I wrote it). Rails is a framework that depends on developer continuity. I view Ruby as a tool for writing very specific things for experts, more than anything else. Web dev in general seems to be against that principle; Ruby could probably benefit a lot from more effort spent on ways to make it hard to do the Wrong Thing at this point.
We found it to be easier to just rewrite the project when moving between major versions (Rails 4 to Rails 5 for example). Shoehorning old functionality into a newer Rails just made this inconsistent.
Depends on how you define rare. Exceedingly uncommon at the very least. stares at a pile of 150 resumes Ruby is a language languishing from being embedded in a few niches, having poor performance, and otherwise being unremarkable, imo. Ruby was made with the idea that picking it up would be easy (which it is), leading to less incentive to learn it.
Putting Ruby in the job description gives you applicants with Ruby experience, which is why the blog post was (and is) impractical. Signaling works.
Calling Ruby "unremarkable" is a significant understatement, I think. For my money nothing in common usage approaches the same kinds of metaprogramming and solving-a-category-of-problems-at-once nature of a really comfortable and dynamic Lisp as does Ruby. (Clojure isn't in common use.)
I get that that's not what you want, you want somebody to close tickets, but that's not Ruby's fault. And most of the people I know still working in Ruby are at a level where that kind of grunt work just isn't worth their time; most others have, of course, moved on.
