I don’t think the language itself is Japanese centric. In the past the discussions among the language development often happened in Japanese, but I don’t think it’s the case anymore (though I don’t follow it closely) since there are a lot of international core language contributors now

Historically - like, way back - a lot of the Ruby core chatter happened on a japanese mailing list, and that's where a lot of decisions ended up taking place, or it wasn't uncommon to have sudden hard subjects bombdrop on the english side while a lot of discussion already happened on the mailing list already so it was hard to catch up.

These days it seems like bugs.ruby-lang.org has most of the chatter.

A lot of bootcamps taught Ruby and Rails in the mid-2010s, so it hasn’t been stagnant for 15 years, maybe since 2017-2018. Then Python (with DS and ML domains exploding) and JS/TS (with Node and React) left Ruby far behind.

That's not the definition of stagnant I would use. Its mostly on the lines of people learning the language, starting new projects, discussions etc.

There are more discussions on Perl being dead, than Ruby being alive.

You can’t have it all at once. Hopefully one day there’s an alternative OS that’s not owned by and American company, but that shouldn’t stop us from building other things in the meantime

We already have Sailfish OS but no one is using it.

I have a Jolla phone preorder. I'll become a user next year (probably)

Years ago I wrote article on this topic: https://www.notonlycode.org/why-python-has-won/

In short (all below is my opinion): it was popular in academia and got some corporate adoption, so when ML exploded in popularity it was a natural choice as the scripting language for ML tooling. On top of that it’s easy to pick up as a language, and it’s a general purpose language - there are lots of scientific tools like pandas written in it, there are web frameworks, etc.

Perl was too quirky for wide adoption and it stopped developing (Raku/Perl 6 took to long to develop), PHP was focused purely on the web, similarly JS. Ruby could have won, I like it more than Python, but outside of Japan it’s also mostly been associated with web development (because of Rails), it also lacked libraries that Python already had.

> Ruby could have won,

Seems unlikely. Its got its own fair share of Perl-inspired quirks.

I had a Roomba+Braava Jet for a few years and I constantly had some issues with both devices, but the worst part was that in theory they should be working well together. There's this function "linked cleaning" where Braava mops the floor right after Roomba finishes vacuuming. But in practice it often didn't work, either the automation didn't trigger, or Roomba got stuck somewhere, cancelled the cleaning, and then Braava started mopping floor that hadn't been vacuumed.

Eventually I moved to Roborock with vacuum+mop in a single device. It still has its issues, but it is ten times better. It's able to lift the mop on the carpet, the mop is self-cleaning, and it has a large tank so that I only have to refill the water once a week instead of every other day. Day and night. Roomba eventually introduced a similar model, but it's been years after competitors had them.

I’m old enough to remember when GitHub was on main page due to a cool feature they added, now they just end up here when it stops working

If I remember it well, every once in a while a new cool feature was also breaking stuff, doubling the chances of getting to the top page here. But truth being told, GitHub was fixing those at light speed too and it was very interesting to follow their progress. Their delivery pipeline (per branch, deliver when ready, etc.) sounded very much innovative by then and I think inspired many people.

This is actually an interesting space, and I think there's a room for such products. Large companies struggle a lot with their knowledge bases, and discoverability is part of the problem (especially when using multiple tools: Confluence, Docs, Chat app, etc.)

The problem here is that there are companies that focus on this area and keep improving their products, while for OpenAI it's one of dozens of tools they launch, so it's hard to believe they'll keep dedicating adequate resources to make this a mature tool that's worth the investment (in form of time and money) for the clients

Unfortunately there's simply no way this is going to happen:

* advertising is profitable for advertisers — they buy ad slots because it brings revenue

* advertising is profitable for publishers — some of the biggest companies in the world (Google, Meta) make most of their revenue from ads

* most people are reluctant to spend money, but they're ok to "spend" their attention and their data

There were multiple attempts with micro-payments and nothing has worked so far. Monthly subscription is preferred by customers and companies, but there are only so many outlets that anyone will subscribe to.

Sure, advertising is profitable. Yet, there are various regulations or social norms telling what is available and what is not. For example, we can think of covering a landmark "because it is profitable" - e.g. think of dressing the Statue of Liberty in clothes of a given brand, or covering the Greek Pantheon in free-to-play game ads.

Of course, tastes matter. The US is littered with (in real world) advertising banners, my native Poland - even more. But there are quite a few places in the Europe in which people would consider it off putting to use a glowing sign on a historical or otherwise clean design.

So it is about both tastes and regulations.

> most people are reluctant to spend money, but they're ok to "spend" their attention and their data

This is a tricky part. Kind of miss times when we were buying paper newspapers.

But let's take an example - devs were reluctant to pay $ for services. Not everyone and their dog pays for tokens.

I really appreciate that there's a company trying to reimagine browsers. Arc was an interesting idea, I used it for a few months, but in the end I switched back to Firefox. I haven't tried Dia yet, and now I'm not sure if I should.

I do think that selling a browser is going to be an extremely difficult task, so having an enterprise software machine with huge customer base might help it, but Atlassian strikes me as a company that will eventually just kill the project and turn this into a de facto acquihire.

If you liked Arc, you should try Zen. I understand it brings many of the same ideas to a Firefox base.

Thanks for recommendation, I'll give it a try

+1, i used firefox since my childhood, never interested by Arc because it's idiotic to me that a browser requires an account. a while back someone suggested Zen, i now use it as my main browser since a bit over a month. really happy :)

Skip Dia, it's a security nightmare.

I never tried it because I was on Windows at the time but I remember my brother raving about it constantly, that I had to try it etc (and reading other people saying the same thing).

I think he's still using it. He probably would have paid something for it.

But then overnight they just weren't interested on building it. So strange.

Right! So many people would have actually paid for Arc to keep active development going, but without even giving that option they switched to Dia...

Atlassian doesn’t kill the products of companies they acquire

This is why small companies still stand a chance. They can build something that would fail the corpo test of metrics and surveys.

Then they get acquired.