I'll be honest, I'm worried too. I'm a fullstack dev, but I consider myself a decent rubyist. I've been writing it for about 10 years and have spoken at rubyconf a few times. All else being equal, I just like the language itself.
The points others make here are true, there are a ton of ruby shops, and demand for someone with a couple years of rails experience is still quite high.
But the issue is not where ruby is now, but where we see it in the long term. My predicted timeline is something like:
1. Right now, plenty of companies are still being founded on rails. The demand for ruby devs well outstrips the supply. I don't think it's the clear favorite anymore, though, even among trendy SF startups.
2. 5 years from now, far fewer companies will be being founded on ruby. It'll be rare, and mostly just when the founder happens to be a seasoned rubyist.
3. 10 years from now, the supply of rails devs will continue to trend upward, but the demand will have been trending downward for a few years and the good jobs will start to be harder to come by (relative to other tool chains)
4. 15 years from now, Ruby will still be going strong at large companies, but few or no early-stage startups will be using it. It will be seen as stagnant and enterprisy.
5. 20-30 years from now, Ruby will be kind of archaic. The demand for seasoned devs will still be there, but it'll be specialized roles to manage a legacy codebases that drives a lot of revenue and isn't worth replacing in a modern language. There will be few jobs, but also few senior rubyists so the jobs will pay well.
So, honestly, you could pick up ruby today and make a whole career out of it. If you're 25 years old, it might be getting a little tough as you approach retirement, but otherwise you'd be fine.
That said, a lot of people don't really want to work in a language that occupies stage 5. I know I don't want to be limited to only working on ancient codebases. And so I, like a lot of people, am hesitant to go all-in on ruby right now. It seems like it's a little too far down the hype curve to base the next 25 or so years of my career on.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible I'm wrong here. One thesis is that JS fatigue will drive a new wave of developers to Rails. Rails has been betting on that with a bunch of features that, theoretically, allow you to skip a lot of what you'd otherwise need JS for.
Personally, I'm unconvinced. I think the future lies in JS-native tech. Specifically Typescript and an all-in-one Rails-like tool like RedwoodJS or something similar. But then, few of us can really guess how these trends will turn out over the course of long decades. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You haven’t really said why you think people will suddenly stop founding companies with Ruby on Rails.
People have been saying Ruby on Rails will go no where since it launched. So far their 5 year predictions have always been wrong.
Personally, I think startups are exciting. I think Rails will still be a favourite with startups in 5 years time because it lets you build MVPs fast. It gives you sensible defaults for things that don’t matter that much but doesn’t enforce them.
The latest updates to to Ruby 3.1 and Rails 7 let you build even faster.
As you mention Ruby on Rails now has a compelling answer to writing frontend JavaScript in Hotwire and Stimulus.
It will soon have a compelling answer to mobile apps too.
Ruby is finally improving it’s static analysis, async and threading weaknesses.
I don’t mind if it’s boring, I’d still bet that Ruby on Rails will be even better for it’s niche in 5 years time.
It’s a safe bet when everything else in startup land is risky.
The problem for Ruby & Rails long term is that it's lost the battle in a lot of different areas. Education will use Python or Javascript if they want an interpreted & loosely typed languages. Numpy dominates the scientific/computational space if you don't want to use Matlab/R/Julia/etc. pyTorch is the way into Machine Learning.
Ruby is starting at a knowledge/awareness deficit and long term it's going to be hard to keep a quality edge to make up for that.
No language ever dies, so talking about Rails disappearing is nonsense.
On the other hand, the interest in it is simply declining, and consistently so (check out the Google trends post above).
> Ruby is finally improving it’s static analysis, async and threading weaknesses.
They're great things (not sure if with "static analysis" you refer to static typing), although threading will never be realistically adopted, giving the 25+ years long history of thread-unsafety (both in terms of library and culture).
I think the crucial factor is async/concurrency. With the explosion of mobile sudden growth is a bigger possibility and the microservice architetcure caters for that. Languages like Node and Go have an advantage over Ruby here. Ruby 3 has addressed the async concerns to some extent but it's unlikely that Rails will ever be based entirely on async Ruby and the MVC model doesn't lend itself to micro services so well.
Why would startups stop using it? Thats going to be the bread-and-butter for as long as I can imagine. It is one of the _most_ productive frameworks for a small/solo team, and makes way too much sense for a POC or anything CRUD oriented.
The points others make here are true, there are a ton of ruby shops, and demand for someone with a couple years of rails experience is still quite high.
But the issue is not where ruby is now, but where we see it in the long term. My predicted timeline is something like:
1. Right now, plenty of companies are still being founded on rails. The demand for ruby devs well outstrips the supply. I don't think it's the clear favorite anymore, though, even among trendy SF startups. 2. 5 years from now, far fewer companies will be being founded on ruby. It'll be rare, and mostly just when the founder happens to be a seasoned rubyist. 3. 10 years from now, the supply of rails devs will continue to trend upward, but the demand will have been trending downward for a few years and the good jobs will start to be harder to come by (relative to other tool chains) 4. 15 years from now, Ruby will still be going strong at large companies, but few or no early-stage startups will be using it. It will be seen as stagnant and enterprisy. 5. 20-30 years from now, Ruby will be kind of archaic. The demand for seasoned devs will still be there, but it'll be specialized roles to manage a legacy codebases that drives a lot of revenue and isn't worth replacing in a modern language. There will be few jobs, but also few senior rubyists so the jobs will pay well.
So, honestly, you could pick up ruby today and make a whole career out of it. If you're 25 years old, it might be getting a little tough as you approach retirement, but otherwise you'd be fine.
That said, a lot of people don't really want to work in a language that occupies stage 5. I know I don't want to be limited to only working on ancient codebases. And so I, like a lot of people, am hesitant to go all-in on ruby right now. It seems like it's a little too far down the hype curve to base the next 25 or so years of my career on.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible I'm wrong here. One thesis is that JS fatigue will drive a new wave of developers to Rails. Rails has been betting on that with a bunch of features that, theoretically, allow you to skip a lot of what you'd otherwise need JS for.
Personally, I'm unconvinced. I think the future lies in JS-native tech. Specifically Typescript and an all-in-one Rails-like tool like RedwoodJS or something similar. But then, few of us can really guess how these trends will turn out over the course of long decades. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯