It is not as prevalent as it used to be. RoR was the framework du jour for a while, and I remember a ton of places using Capybara and Watir for AT work. You don’t see the demand for those as much in my corners of the industry.
Agreed, it's not the most popular starting point for some folks these days, but development of Rails and Ruby itself keep going. I see a few job postings here and there for it, you see some companies starting up with slightly older CTOs still reaching for it cuz they know it best and it works well. Rails' creator, DHH, even makes a point of Ruby being one of the most token-efficient languages for AI tools, for what that's worth.
Again I know it's not the most popular stack these days, it's certainly not everywhere anymore. I still think some folks would be surprised at knowing it's still chugging along and far from legacy stuff.
It might be token efficient when reading and generating code, but if it's interpreted and dinamically typed you quickly lose that advantage when the AI need to repeatedly run and test the application to find bugs that would have been easily caught by a compiler.
Even Cobol is still chugging in some places, but I am not sure what that proves. I am that old to remember when Ruby was launched, and I remember the hype around Ruby on Rails, and Ruby everywhere. It was backnin golden days of Java and OOP, but I never really jumped on the train personally. If Ruby was invented today, it would be probably just one of many posts in /r/programminglanguages.
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u/lazyzefiris 20h ago
You need to at least have heard of the language to hate it. These kids only heard of Javascript.