Wired Article Ignites Debate: 'Ruby Is Not A Serious Programming Language'

A recent article published in Wired has sent ripples through the software development community, boldly asserting that ‘Ruby is not a serious programming language’ and that its continued existence relies more on developer affection than practical utility. The piece critiques Ruby’s dynamic typing system, arguing that while theoretically flexible for small-scale projects, it becomes a significant liability in large-scale applications, contributing to ‘foot guns’ – features that make it easy to introduce errors. Furthermore, the article highlights Ruby’s consistently poor performance profile, citing Twitter’s infamous ‘fail whale’ incident during the 2010 World Cup as a pivotal moment that led the company to migrate its backend from Ruby to Scala, achieving up to 100 times faster processing speeds.

The Wired analysis further contends that Ruby now struggles to find a distinct niche, with other languages like Python dominating scientific computing and AI, and JavaScript cementing its position in web development. While acknowledging Ruby on Rails’ historical impact as a pioneering web framework that fueled Ruby’s widespread adoption and influenced other frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, the article suggests Rails now sustains Ruby in a ‘parasitic relationship.’ Evidence of Ruby’s waning relevance is presented through Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey, which shows its popularity plummeting from a top 10 technology in 2013 to 18th place, even falling behind Assembly. Industry experts, including veteran developer Steph, largely concur with this assessment, advising against investing in technologies with diminishing community support and infrastructure due to the long-term risks of obsolescence and difficulties in finding maintainers.