I can't tell if this is a poor attempt at sarcasm, but if not:

Do you have evidence to back up the claim that Ruby isn't being used for new projects? Even assuming HN is a skewed environment, I see enough Ruby projects popping up here to make that seem unlikely.

Yes, not sure how much evidence you need. I mean just look at the Tiobe Index:

http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/images/history_R...

1.9 was initially released 2007, 1.9.1 was released in 2009... Not sure if you remember it, but one of the early 1.9 releases was reeeeally buggy.

Quite on the contrary. 1.9-compat was very quickly expected of all libs and all important core libs run better on >1.9.

1.9 was the cleanup release after the language became popular and very necessary.

Also, everything before 1.9.2 was considered a preview release.

> Quite on the contrary. 1.9-compat was very quickly expected of all libs and all important core libs run better on >1.9.

That's quite some historical revisionism -- there was quite a while when quite a lot of libraries weren't running on 1.9. It wasn't as bad as with Python, probably because Ruby wasn't popular for as long as Python was, so there weren't as many big libraries that were hard to update. But it was a huge deal.

> 1.9 was the cleanup release after the language became popular and very necessary.

It was necessary for much the same kind of reasons (and, sometimes, the exact same specific reasons) as Python 3 -- particularly, the string encoding problem.

> That's quite some historical revisionism

I concur. The _expectancy_ that libraries should be updated was there pretty quickly. New libraries were generally created with both versions in mind. It was a huge porting effort, especially with 1.9.0 being very buggy, but there was a general sense in the community that you need to port or die.

At least the whole Google Appengine Ruby suite never worked on 1.9. Also JRuby took some time to be 100% 1.9 compatible.

We're at Ruby 2.1.x and every single gem I used in the past six months has been ported to it. I use Ruby only for Rails so I might be seeing a small environment, but it's 96 gems in the project I have in my editor right now. There are still many new projects in Ruby. I probably make half of my income with them.

> We're at Ruby 2.1.x and every single gem I used in the past six months has been ported to it.

Yeah, but 2.x didn't have major breaking changes. The big breaking change from 1.8.x that parallels the Python 2->3 change was 1.9, which has been out for two years longer than Python 3.