
Introducing Rubinius X - yannski
http://rubini.us/2013/10/15/introducing-rubinius-x/
======
cromwellian
I'm going to lose a lot of karma of this one, but here we go. The
organizations I know of that have switched from Ruby to Java have done so for
the following reasons:

1) Performance. The JVM simply scales better, it is more cost effective in the
datacenter. Without mentioning names, I know of significant Silicon Valley
darlings that spent huge sums trying to scale Ruby, got crushed, and
eventually ripped-and-replaced the backends with Java.

2) Skill Availability. There are 7+ million Java programmers, it is easier to
hire Java programmers.

3) Tool Availability and Maturity.

I think Ruby is a fine language, but I see it like PHP, great for rapid
prototyping and productivity in the small, but it's version 1 for the lean
startup or for the corporate departmental app. Version 2 is Java, C#, etc
using the UX and product feature lessons learned from the Ruby prototype.

IMHO, Node.js is the new Ruby. It has the benefit of having the same language
on the client and the server, but once again, it's going to run into similar
scalability issues when large organizations try to use it. I think we're going
to run into the same issues, of it becoming a cool bandwagon, the platform
being stretched to its breaking point, followed by the realization that there
are serious problems.

~~~
marcocampos
I don't know why people keep complaining about Ruby's (MRI) speed. Yes, it's
not that fast but for most programmer's doing web development it doesn't
matter. Remember, you are (probably) not writing the next
Twitter/Facebook/whatever. You are (probably) writing a boring LOB web
application.

Not everyone is working on a startup trying to peddle their stuff to a zillion
users and getting hammered in the process. If you ever get to
Twitter/Facebook/whatever size no out-of-box solution is going to work. You'll
end up doing what Twitter did which is re-architect all their
infrastructure/code and tune all their stuff as much has possible.

Ruby's issue IMHO is that it has always been a Rails-centric
community/ecosystem and never had the change to grow beyond that. It's still
largely used to write web stuff and nothing else. Python, which is a "similar"
language, has a much healthier and more diverse ecosystem being used in things
like scientific computing or computer vision.

If you want to make Ruby better, grow beyond the web application ecosystem and
make it more diverse.

~~~
Argorak
I agree with the Rails-centrism issue. Even alternative web frameworks have a
hard time in the Ruby world.

I disagree with the assumption that Ruby is web only. E.g. Chef and Puppet are
huge efforts that have no direct connection to frontend web, both written in
Ruby. Vagrant as well. Ruby is big in the infrastructure world.

~~~
marcocampos
What about game framework, computer vision, scientific computing, robotics,
etc? I'm sure you can come up with examples for each of these but most are
either dormant/abandoned or simply non-existant. As for infrastructure, yes
Chef and Puppet are big in the startup world but I know a lot more companies
using Python or Java for that.

~~~
chc
Companies use Java instead of Puppet? How does the conversation go where you
even start to compare those two things?

~~~
empthought
"Hey do we have $X million for Opsware?"

"Sure thing."

"Damn it feels good to be a banker."

------
beat
Businesses (meaning Big Business, I suppose) don't reject Ruby because it's "a
dying language". They reject it because they're inherently conservative. Java
and .Net rule the roost because they're seen as safe, respectable choices.

 _The appearance of risk_ is more important to most businesses than actual
risk. Ruby isn't dominant, therefore it is perceived as risky. Java's
complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project, but it's
not "risky" because it's dominant.

~~~
macspoofing
>The appearance of risk is more important to most businesses than actual risk.
Ruby isn't dominant, therefore it is perceived as risky ...

That's not quite right. Anecdotally, I've seen or read about big corps using
hot JS front-end frameworks like Angular and Backbone, server frameworks and
databases like Node.js, MongoDB and Redis, and programming languages like
Python, Erlang and Scala in production. Even if you look at the big tech corps
(such as Yahoo, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon), internally there isn't a
whole lot of Ruby either. The big poster-child for Ruby, Twitter, is now most
known for migrating away from Ruby than for actually using it.

I'm not a Ruby guy, but it doesn't seem like cliche corporate conservatism is
what's holding Ruby back. It looks like it's Ruby, and specifically the Ruby
platform. Maybe pretty Ruby language semantics aren't enough to make up for
Ruby platform downsides. Maybe there just isn't a good reason to use Ruby.

>Java's complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project

The choice of Java would _not_ threaten the survival of any small project.
Though Java is (still) not a very pretty language, the tooling around it has
gotten enormously better from where we were in, say, 2003. Current frameworks
like JEE, Spring and Play are actually pretty great to work with.

~~~
jliechti1
Indeed, I wanted to mention this as well.

Furthermore, I think Python (actually Jython) is starting to become for
prevalent in the enterprise space. I've seen a few different enterprise
software suites from companies like IBM and HP that support writing extensions
in Jython. I know that the JVM implementation of Ruby is JRuby, but is anyone
using that in production? Jython seems relatively more stable/mature, but I
really don't know much about JRuby.

~~~
Xylakant
I know of a couple of installations that use jruby in production. It's often
coupled with some sort of java service in the backend, so sure, it's used in
production.

It's also stable, even though it tends to lag a little behind cruby in some
features. The 2.0.0 feature set is not yet implemented fully.

~~~
beat
I'm using JRuby in the code I'm developing for my startup, in order to access
Java libs I need. The biggest issue has been that it doesn't support Ruby 2.0
yet, which is merely aesthetic at this point for me. JRuby hasn't given me any
grief since I got it going.

------
davidw
No, Ruby died last month, but now it's cool again in a retro sort of way.
Node.js is what's dying this week. Next month, Tcl is going to make a
comeback.

~~~
jaequery
i sincerely think that what ruby just needs is just a really good wordpress
alternative.

~~~
dasil003
I disagree. The strength of ruby is in rapid development. It is not best for
performance, installation or deployment. Therefore it's good for teams
building software, but it will never be good for install-your-own open source
software like WordPress. Since the vast majority of WordPress users never even
look at the code there is absolutely nothing to be gained by not using PHP.

~~~
pessimizer
>[Ruby] is not best for performance, installation or deployment.

PHP isn't either, except that it's packaged well in Linux.

If there were good packages for Ruby in Debian, the only advantage that PHP
would have is in being the shared hosting default. Both are pretty equally
performant, and Ruby has the advantage of being a nicely designed language.

>there is absolutely nothing to be gained by not using PHP.

What is there to be gained by using PHP?

~~~
bliker

        <?= 'Hello World' ?>

------
bradleyland
I'm kind of disappointed in the way the author is approaching the launch of
Rubinius X. The "death of Ruby" is being used as a rhetorical device. The
strategy appears to be that if we all believe that Ruby is actually dying,
we're more likely to get behind Rubinius X. Unfortunately, no support is
provided for this claim.

Rubinius has always been the Ruby that placed purity before pragmatism. I
applaud them for that, but putting forth the assertion that Ruby is dying as a
means to drum up support for a new generation of Ruby seems like getting off
on the wrong foot.

~~~
dragonwriter
Ruby _does_ seem to be, if not dying, at least losing a lot of the buzz it had
a few years back, but mostly that seems to be because _Rails_ has lost the
buzz it had, and much of Ruby's buzz was actually _not_ Ruby buzz, but Rails
buzz.

That being said, I think the vision Rubinius X has about where Ruby should go
is great -- both in terms of language features and conventions -- and I think
that besides the specific details, the high-level strategic vision is
something Ruby needs.

~~~
habitue
It _is_ suspicious though that the Rubinius project just lost funding from
Engine Yard, and now (like a week later?) the maintainer has declared Ruby
dead and Rubinius X is the answer. It seems like death throes (of Rubinius) to
me, rather than any substantial commentary on Ruby in general.

~~~
dragonwriter
A few points:

1\. Dying != dead

2\. In addition to being maintainer of Rubinius, Brian Shirai is the creator
of RubySpec. To me, Rubinius X is more a forward-looking extension of RubySpec
then it is something about building support for Rubinius-the-project. As
RubySpec sought to create and concretize agreement on what Ruby _is_ (which
was important to making Ruby-the-language something more than MRI-the-
implementation), Rubinius X is an (opinionated) effort to establish a
consensus on where Ruby-the-language is _going_ and how it is going to address
the aspects of Ruby that are limiting its adoption.

3\. I'm not at all surprised that the fact that Engine Yard, historically one
of the biggest corporate players in the Ruby world and who until fairly
recently was paying core developers for _both_ JRuby and Rubinius is now not
directly sponsoring _either_ would be a source of soul searching and
consideration of the future, both of the Rubinius and Ruby. I'd be rather more
surprised if it _wasn 't_.

------
gesman
Lets face it - Ruby is a great language and wrapped with Rails it allows to
craft napkin idea to working, real-world prototype in record short amount of
time.

These capabilities prove to be golden for Silicon Valley startups where speed
of execution means difference between life and death (VC or nothing).

Once done - startups are praying for a quick exit until the issues of gems
mess, scaling, performance and deployment nightmares start raising their ugly
heads and requires ample continuous investments in administration and
management talents to keep things afloat.

Serious multi-billion enterprises need performance, guarantees of commercial
support from big vendor, speed of compiled languages and cannot afford to use
interpreted languages and have their feet stuck in all that swamp.

Hence they use Java and dot NET. That's a fact of life.

~~~
lectrick
Given that you will have to figure out scaling issues eventually anyway, the
speed of compiled languages should NOT be weighed heavier than programming
ease in your decisionmaking. Programmer time is FAR more expensive than
hardware these days.

~~~
gesman
Throwing money in hardware to compensate for chosen framework's sluggishness
doesn't seems to run well with people who sign the checks.

~~~
bcoates
This has not been my experience. Any problem that can be solved by buying
another server is generally considered to be a solved problem.

~~~
epsylon
Yep, engineer time costs probably orders of magnitude more than adding a few
servers.

------
starrhorne
There are 20-30 ruby conferences every year in the US alone. I've been to
about 7. They all had > 200 attendees. Even the less-known ones tend to sell
out well in advance.

Freelance rates for ruby developers are crazy-high. In Seattle, at least, I'm
seeing $200/hr as not uncommon.

And on a side note, PHP has been around for about 80 years now and it's still
moving along.

So I don't think ruby/rails are going to "die" any time soon.

~~~
integraton
There are also more job listings on Angel List referencing Ruby (640) than
jobs referencing Node / Node.js (399) or Python (454).

~~~
malero
Indeed.com

Ruby: 6,401 Python: 8,299 .NET: 26,711 Java: 36,069

An interesting switch is: Django Developer: 1,199 Rails Developer: 3,682

I don't think Ruby, Python, etc will die anytime soon. There are too many
small businesses that need products developed fast. PHP on the other hand...

PHP Developer: 10,317 What?! ;)

------
dcu
...until people realize the mess that is node.js. I would rather say Rails is
dying because it no longer fits the new web programming paradigms.

~~~
jackweirdy
Why is node.js a mess?

~~~
integraton
JavaScript is a messy language, but ignoring that, the module ecosystem is a
mess. There are many duplicated modules, many of them done in a half-assed
manner by inexperienced developers and rarely updated.

For example, the Node community absolutely loves MongoDB for inexplicable
reasons, and support for other datastores is terrible. Despite Postgres
supporting hstore for years and Node being popular for years, the two hstore
modules are "node-postgres-hstore" (7 stars on github) which hasn't been
updated in _1 year_ and "node-hstore" (17 stars on github) that hasn't been
updated in _2 years._ Everything I've seen indicates that this is typical for
modules in Node.

Meanwhile, Ruby and Rails support Postgres extremely well at this point.

Similarly, node has several migration libraries, all of which are pretty
limited. One of the popular ones, "node-migrate" by one of the most prolific
node module developers, still has an open issue from _2 years ago_ about using
timestamped migrations, with the developer commenting as if the concept is
news to him ([https://github.com/visionmedia/node-
migrate/issues/2](https://github.com/visionmedia/node-migrate/issues/2))

~~~
clavalle
>There are many duplicated modules, many of them done in a half-assed manner
by inexperienced developers and rarely updated.

This statement accurately describes the world of Ruby gems.

~~~
integraton
That might be fun to claim, but the reality is that it's 2013, not 2007. The
Ruby ecosystem is much more robust at this point.

~~~
dragonwriter
The greater robustness means that: 1\. There are more high quality modules, so
if you look hard enough, you are likely to find one for your tasks, 2\. There
is an _even greater number_ of duplicative, half-assed, and poorly maintained
modules than there were in 2007 (some of which existed but weren't half-assed
or poorly maintained in 2007), and those are still quite often the first ones
you'll run into when looking for something that does what you want.

------
al2o3cr
Similarly, C and Java are dying since nobody touts their use of them in PR
materials. Also Postgres and HTTP. /snark

Technology hipsterism != technology vitality.

~~~
d0m
It depends of the language I suppose. Ruby was all about being new, cool and
fun. Call that hipsterism if you want. But now that people moved on, it's fair
to ask ourselves "Who is going to use Ruby for their next project?". Big
company? No. Hipsters? No. You? Maybe : )

~~~
jmagoon
I work at a big company and we use ruby all the time. It's a powerful
scripting language that we can rapidly develop in for the 1000s (literally) of
small programs that need to work with our legacy unix systems.

------
bencollier49
"The few exceptions prove the rule".

I don't think this means what he thinks it means.

~~~
talkingquickly
Agreed, I think the author has mis-understood what it means. Quite a common
one to get wrong though, for anyone wondering it generally means that stating
an exception proves/ establishes/ implies that a general rule exists.

E.g. You may not play ball in the park within 20 metres of the road implies
that the general rules is that you can play ball elsewhere in the park.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule)

------
Mikeb85
Rails is dying.

Ruby isn't. It just isn't as popular amongst hipster web programmers
anymore...

There's some very interesting things going on in the non-Rails and non-web
framework Ruby world...

~~~
the_watcher
What is the evidence that Rails is dying? The programming bootcamp movement is
primarily Rails-based, One Month Rails just came out of YC, and I know of at
least one other S13 YC company who built their web app in Rails. What seems to
have changed is that not every startup is being built with Rails anymore,
which I'd say is a positive thing that does not mean Rails is dying.

~~~
Mikeb85
The hype is dying. I also think the web is moving beyond the Rails model...

~~~
randomdata
The hype is definitely dying, as it should. Rails is just months shy of being
10 years old. I find it kind of amazing that using Rails was even newsworthy
within the past couple of years, given how long it has been in use.

A startup choosing Rails to power their application today is like a startup
choosing Linux to power their servers. It is not something worth reporting. It
doesn't necessarily mean the usage is in decline though.

------
vlucas
"Ruby is failing to help businesses engage customers. It is seen as
inefficient and inferior to other languages."

This is pure bullshit. If your business is advertising a particular
programming language in order to "engage customers", you are doing something
terribly wrong (unless you're in a niche developer market). Your customer
doesn't even care about the programming language your site is written in at
all. All they want is business value. If the value of your software outweighs
the cost, THAT is how you engage customers.

Ruby and other dynamic languages like Python and PHP will always have a place,
no matter how they do or don't scale. The danger for 95% of startups is
complete failure - not succeeding and not getting any traction at all, not
"OMG how are we going to scale this with the hundreds of millions of pageviews
we have?". A focus on rapid prototyping and productivity for a small team is
exactly what most startups need, and Ruby/Rails is a great fit for that. It's
not going anywhere, and it's certainly not going to die.

------
lectrick
If you love a tool, it won't die. Period.

And lots of people (myself included) still love Ruby.

And I finally released a potentially useful gem for medium to large Ruby/Rails
codebases. Are unmitigated monkeypatches complexifying your codebase to the
point of pain? I wrote a gem to help manage that...

[https://github.com/pmarreck/pachinko](https://github.com/pmarreck/pachinko)

------
thinkpad20
A baseless, attention-grabbing headline, a vague language spec that doesn't
really seem to be adding any new ideas (and indeed rejecting some good ones),
and no actual working code. Get back to me when you actually write something;
until then all this is is a glorified blog post with a "wouldn't it be nice if
there were ____ language out there?"

------
davidroetzel
I have so many thoughts about this post right now, that I find it hard to put
them into a coherent comment. Still, I want them out there:

1) I, too, feel that Ruby is no longer as fashionable as it used to be. I do
not think this to be much of a problem and more like the natural way fashions
work. But I still think the effect can be observed. It was not long ago that I
learned about a cool new project written in Ruby here on HN on a weekly basis.
These days, it has become a rare occurence.

2) It is a fact that the "cool kids" have moved on. But there is not the one
big new thing. Rather, people who were popular in the Ruby world 5 years ago
use Scala, Clojure, Node.js, Go and a few other things these days.

3) Still, Rails seems to be very popular with startups. Maybe not with the
ones that are highly technical. But many of those just trying to get a mvp out
there seem to default to rails these days.

4) I love Ruby. I used to love learning new programming languages. But ever
since writing Ruby code on a daily basis, other languages most often fail to
attract me. And I no longer look at technical benefits. Instead I take a look
at the syntax and most often I am annoyed. Ruby has this effect on _some_
people, but not on others. For those who do not care about Ruby's aesthetics,
there is probably little to keep them from trying out other languages.

5) There is little in the list of features on x.rubini.us that I disagree
with. But at the same time, there is nothing I ever missed. Also, I am not
convinced that all of those issues can or should be solved on the interpreter
level.

6) Instead of a list of features, I would love to see a list of the kinds of
applications that would benefit from those. I am not convinced that Node.js-
style network services should be the future of Ruby.

------
eric970
[rant] If you're going to claim that your strong opinions are facts, please
treat them as such and give citations or back them up yourself. [/rant]

Ruby is not my favorite language anymore, but I still use it and see evidence
that there is a huge place it fills in the dev community and ecosystem. I have
never used a more expressive language. I'm stating this as a fact from what I
have experienced, and I'm giving points that back it up. There are dozens of
actively maintained Ruby projects, some of which are the most popular repos on
GitHub. I don't see any evidence that the Ruby ecosystem is on a downward
trend of activity and is "dying", so I have no reason to think otherwise.

This kind of stuff reminds me why I take breaks from HackerNews every once in
a while -_- Yuck.

------
rhapsodyv
The post doesn't point to any data proving the point. I'm curios from where he
had concluded that ruby is dying...

~~~
yannski
From his media trainer, certainly...

~~~
kookster
+1 this: sensational headline = controversy = hackernews frontpage

------
notwedtm
Um, wut?

This post is so confusing. I see some half thought out ideas, but no
solutions.

Ruby may not be Java or JavaScript, but why would you want it to be? You have
Java and JavaScript for times when you want to use Java or JavaScript.

Use the right tool for the job.

------
yannski
The post contains lots of contradictory facts.

First, _some_ people (not all) are using other tools than Ruby. They are
looking for a solution to their problems. IMHO Ruby is not even present in the
discussion when people make their choices. But Rails is. So I'm not sure that
modernizing Ruby is sufficient. Building a modern framework around it could be
though. I mean, people go to NodeJS because of Node, not because of
Javascript...

~~~
the_watcher
>>But Rails is

I was about to mention this. I know of at least two (very) hot S13 YC
companies that either built their web app in Rails or explicitly deal with
Rails (not sure if One Month Rails is built in Rails or not, but it is pretty
explicitly pro-Rails). Does Rails prevalence preclude Ruby from being a dying
language? Depends on what you mean by dying. The dominance of Rails is
probably something of a blessing and a curse for the broader Ruby world. I'm
too new to it to have a strong position, but I will say that as a novice
developer, I went with Ruby and Rails because there is a fantastic suite of
tools for learning from scratch.

~~~
Mikeb85
Rails is a curse. Because of it, Ruby (which is a fantastic language) has been
reduced to a web language, when it's really much more than that.

~~~
jaredonline
Ruby was a little-known project before Rails came along. Without Rails, we
wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

------
kookster
Many Rails folks have moved on to other things, many of them to Node.js, and
in general development is becoming less homogenous (i.e. Go services
interacting with a Rails app/middleware, and an Angular.js front-end). This is
a good thing; we are seeing people more willing to use the right tool for the
job rather than trying to use one language for everything.

~~~
jwarzech
This. I think of any of the comments so far you express what I'm seeing as
well (I know 'use case of 1'). Distributed & modularized apps where each
component uses the language/framework best suited for the job.

------
cryptolect
The most common complaint I hear when I talk about Ruby is it's poor
performance. The languages I hear mentioned most often (by the complainers) as
alternatives include Go and Node.js.

I've used Ruby for a few years as a part-time coder. In that time I've never
ventured out to try the variety of Ruby interpreters available. For instance,
I've heard of JRuby, and I have also heard it's really fast, but it just seems
like it's intended for "enterprise" use-cases, rather than my day to day
scenarios.

If there are all these faster Ruby interpreter variants out there, one
'evangelism' approach could simply be to make them more visible and
approachable to end-users.

There's also opportunities for package maintainers to work to make these
alternatives available in the various Linux/Unix distributions. I want to be
able to apt-get them, rather than hunt down a PPA or build via RVM.

Is there anything else beyond speed that is holding Ruby back from greater
mindshare?

~~~
dasil003
You mentioned performance and packaging. There's also concurrency issues but
those are improving.

The most interesting critique of Ruby I've heard recently was from Tom Stuart
@ Ruby Manor this year:

[http://lanyrd.com/2013/ruby-manor/scffpd/](http://lanyrd.com/2013/ruby-
manor/scffpd/)

In this talk he demonstrated how the multi-paradigm nature of Ruby makes it
hard to fully realize the benefits of a single paradigm like FP or OOP.

This is obviously not something that CTOs are bringing up in tech provisioning
discussions, but I think it does prevent ruby from having the kind of
strengths that would make it a go-to language for certain types of projects
the way that Go, Scala, Node.js or Haskell are able to do these days. I think
Ruby's biggest appeal is to programmers who care a great deal about aesthetics
and expressiveness of code.

------
adamkittelson
This post really needed to follow up on the whole "Ruby is dying" part with
some sort of "and here's how Rubinius X can help" part.

The way it's written has caused everyone here to debate whether or not Ruby is
dying and completely ignore the announcement. I'm sure the title of the HN
link isn't helping either.

~~~
regularfry
That would be in the first link.

------
27182818284
It has definitely lost the cool edge that it had. In the midwestern US, it
takes longer for trends to penetrate and I saw the Ruby height in popularity
here after it had been eating Hacker News alive for a while. Now out here, it
is definitely Node.js. All the new young developers talk about it. The old PHP
devs in town talk about it, but can't switch to it because all of their
libraries and business is in PHP, etc.

Interestingly enough, event-loop non-blocking, etc is NEVER the reason
mentioned by the devs interested in it and using it. They only mention how
nice it is to have basically the same language in the frontend and backend.
They claim not having your brain switch like that is a huge benefit (which I
could believe, but I haven't tried. (Python+Django+Flask dev myself))

------
ciferkey

      To be relevant today, a programming language must provide simple yet powerful facilities for composition and collaboration. A language does not need general immutable state, purely pure functions, or complex type systems, no matter how inferred.
    

Is this a poke at Haskell?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Is this a poke at Haskell?

Its saying that a language doesn't have to be Haskell to be relevant. If
that's what you consider a "poke", then sure.

------
otikik
[http://x.rubini.us/](http://x.rubini.us/)

I like everything I read there except undefined. I have been using Lua for a
while now and having only two falsy values is great. I am not convinced adding
a third is a good trade-off.

------
SmileyKeith
Ruby just seems to be actually getting used by large projects. I personally
think that makes sense because you want to see that a language can stand some
sort of test of time before entirely adopting it. I think what Jeff Atwood had
to say about it [1] when choosing to use it for Discourse [2] shows a
different opinion that this article. One that I agree with more.

[1]: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-
ruby.html](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html) [2]:
[http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/)

~~~
smacktoward
Atwood's argument boils down to "I wanted to work with this one guy, and what
he uses is Ruby." Which is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't really say
much about the popularity of the language among programmers in general.

------
desireco42
This is such a flame bait :) Does Rubinius really needs this?

I installed it last week and trying it out with Rails 4 to see how it feels.
Ruby is alive and well. And mainstream.

------
rupert654
I hate this phrase. It doesn't mean what people think it means and wouldn't
make any sense if it did:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule)

------
hugh4life
While I find the project interesting, I see nothing about performance. I'd
like to see a focus on performance using optional type annotations.

[http://www.mirah.org](http://www.mirah.org)

------
reillyse
what a load of rubbish.

I have seen absolutely no evidence that Ruby is dying or even ill.

This article provides absolutely no evidence but just makes a completely
unsubstantiated claim.

Saying startups aren't bragging that they are using Ruby as proof that it is
dead is pretty dumb. Sure Ruby isn't the hot new thing anymore, it's not as
"cool" as it used to be and the people who always want to be trying the latest
languages aren't experimenting with it and writing blogs about it. But it's
very much alive and kicking, just much more mature and less sexy. Which is
inevitable.

------
djhworld
I'm not entirely sure what this is, is it a rewrite/syntax clean up of the
existing ruby language that runs on the Rubinus VM?

------
websitescenes
This post is hilarious but all jokes aside I am still interested to see what
"Rubinius X" turns out to be.

------
rip747
so a week ago it was CFML and this week its Ruby. is there going to be any
week that the languages i program in doesn't get bashed on the net ;)

------
dasil003
The hyperbole is undermining the point.

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static_typed
Ruby is not dead, it just smells that way. Seriously though, it's demise is a
little overstated - the BBC for one use it quite a bit, as do quite a few
startups. The author of the post seems a bit butthurt that Ruby has not
surplanted all other technologies - and it never will.

One big problem is that for most businesses their first and perhaps last taste
of Ruby comes from Rails, and it's security fails. That is a shame.

Having been burnt by the failed promises of Rails ourselves, our company moved
onto Python, and never looked back.

Also, Ruby is just one tool in the kit, fine for some jobs, patently
unsuitable for many others. The evangelists should realise this, and not do a
disservice to Ruby by trying to shove it into every place and frankly pissing
off potential future adopters of that technology.

