Ruby and Rails — Hype or Success?
- Published July 14th, 2007 in Tech Comment, Ruby
Skeptics are still wondering how is Ruby and Rails doing. So was I some time ago. Did it survive the initial hype that made a lot of people jump into the bandwagon? After using it, are people happy with it and willing to use it again? What about enterprises, are they considering or already using Ruby/Rails?
In the first place, why should it be hype? Hype can be usually seen as a great expectance over a new product or service to be released in the future. The iPhone was surrounded by a huge hype. It seems it corresponded to the utmost skepticism. But back to the main subject of this post. Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
Hype does not apply to Rails. It became famous due to its capabilities. It was a proven horsepower which started attracting a lot of interest. It was not something kept secretive and waiting to be released. It existed. Ruby, itself, since 1994.
We may see this phenomena as the inverse of hype (a product existing without being known vs a product still not existing but already very famous). Rails helped exposing not only the framework itself but also the amazing underneath programming language that is Ruby. As people started to know it they started realizing how powerful, clean and simple it is.
If we take a look at 2007 statistics about programming language growth we’ll see that Ruby is still growing like crazy. Still? Yes, of course. Rails got famous around 2005. Two years have passed and it’s still enjoying a lot of growth.
Gazillions of Ruby deviations and target implementations were created. Other programming languages started following Rails steps. And the IT industry? Oracle, for instance, is publicly recruiting Rails enthusiasts. Several others are following the same steps.
Michel Barbosa, a BSc finalist, dug deeper and wrote his bachelor’s thesis around the evaluation of Ruby’s and Ruby on Rails’ growth and adoption rate. A very interesting citation: 95.9% would still adopt Rails, knowing what they know now.. You can read his thesis here.
So, Ruby and Ruby on Rails are here to say for the following years.
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