

Ruby is dying -- and the graph to prove it. - illumen
http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?measure=commits&percent=true&l0=java&l1=javascript&l2=-1&l3=python&l4=ruby&l5=-1&commit=Update

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acangiano
That's quite a sensationalist headline, don't you think?

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nickb
Heh, fallacy with that chart is that it's tracking only MRI. There are many
Ruby implementations in various stages of progress.

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mechanical_fish
Fallacy B is pretending that the rate at which the interpreter is patched is
some sort of measure of a language's quality, or of its community's health. As
if the goal of a language designer _wasn't_ to reach the point where the core
was stable. As if running the risk of breaking existing code was a _good_
thing.

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lacker
This is pretty ridiculous - it's counting just one website, using "number of
submits" as the metric, and when they say "dying" they mean "at the same level
as 2007".

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lucraft
Interesting... I wonder if there's a bias here? I know that Ohloh is not very
popular in the Ruby community. What would you get if you used Github instead?

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kschrader
Ruby is a tool that you use to build things. This is like saying that saws are
dying because less wood was cut over the last few months.

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illumen
Not quite.

It's like saying, saws are dying because more people are using motorised robot
cutting machines now.

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teej
Relative to all commits tracked by whatever random website this is. Click
"values" to see a slightly different story.

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illumen
I think the values graph has a bug at the end point... It looks like it is
displaying half a month or something -- for every language. For values it
still shows a drop for ruby, apart from the bug at the end.

ohloh is a website which tracks lots of open source projects. 266,149 projects
was the count at the time of writing.

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sheatsb
Empirically, the Ruby is far from death. There is an active community, more
publications than before, and an array of frameworks (Sinatra, Rhodes, RoR) to
choose from. Saying Ruby is dying is like looking at a single tree in the
forest, noticing it's diseased, and claiming the entire forest will fall to
that disease.

Also, it's being forked for individual reasons, like Ruby Enterprise, thanks
to sites like github.

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illumen
There's less people writing ruby code. Both in the interpreter itself, and for
open source projects using ruby. You can see on that page a graph showing less
people are writing ruby code too.

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schof
Also, you see a vastly different picture if you click the "values" link rather
than the "percent" link. Not sure why.

