Why is Ruby so popular?
Ruby is known as a simple and intuitive programming language. This makes beginner developers get attracted to ruby. It can be used to develop full-scale standalone GUI-based applications. Not only this, but it can also be great for serving web pages. Ruby is undoubtedly one of the leaders among the highest-paid programming languages. Ruby is gaining popularity due to the fact that MVPs are very often developed with the help of this technology. Ruby and its most popular framework, Rails, are famous for their great flexibility, security, and short development period.
Why is the popularity of Ruby decreasing?
These days, the popularity of ruby is decreasing. Many people believe that ruby was developed on a philosophical concept without keeping account of reality. Let's deep dive into the situation:
Microservices took over the backend over the past decade, and Rails never really set itself up as a strong competitor upon which to build a microservice stack:
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Ruby is pretty slow. Slow spin-up time, slow execution time. Companies gradually swapped out Ruby microservices with different frameworks, and even Rails-frontend companies ended up with an architecture where 95% of their important services were Java or Node, with only a shallow frontend rendered in Rails. It's not that ruby was bad. It was not up to the mark.
Single Page Applications are the future (and honestly, the present), and Ruby on Rails is significantly less of a differentiator when you strip out ERB and templating (the whole "view" part of MVC). Rails still works fine as the backend API for your SPA, but a lot of other frameworks work fine as APIs as well. If all of your logic is in Javascript + React, it's easy to swap out the API layer with a different stack — and a lot of devs preferred a different stack.
Static Types the fact is, Ruby breaks down in projects over a certain size (in both headcount and line count) because the types aren't there. It's fast to write Ruby but not easy to refactor unless you a highly responsible for writing tests.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Ruby?
Ruby is an open-source dynamic and object-oriented programming language. It is an interpreted language that means source code is compiled by an interpreter at the time of execution.
What are the uses of Ruby?
Ruby is generally used for building web applications. It is a general-purpose programming language and finds many applications in data analysis, prototyping, and proof of concept.
What are the disadvantages of Ruby applications?
The real disadvantage of ruby applications is the speed. Since it is interpreted by the compiler at the time of execution, therefore it possesses less speed as compared to equivalent compiled applications.
Conclusion
This blog discussed why ruby is so popular and why its popularity is decreasing day by day.
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