I’d be interested in going one step further and asking why that was. Rails is great, but so is Ruby, but normally a great library like Rails helps attract developers to the language. Rails is the only example I can think of where a widely popular library (ostensibly) leads to fewer users of the language for other purposes.
I wonder if it's because Rails creates such a specific set of expectations that when you actually try to do something without it you run into problems. "Oh, that's only a rails thing? I thought that was a ruby thing..."
Ruby's monkey patching convention might make this worse.
I actually failed a technical interview relatively recently because of this.
It was a fullstack position with some Ruby scripts here and there mostly centered around scheduling. Had a leetcode style takehome that requested I build out a pretty simple reservation system with time off and quarter hours and stuff like that.
I boot up into the leetcode environment and was surprised at just how many things were Rails-specific, rather than being in the ruby STD lib. Completely threw me off since I suddenly had to figure out how to wrestle the Date STD lib to work for me, and anything date/time related is my personal hell :)
I’d be interested in going one step further and asking why that was. Rails is great, but so is Ruby, but normally a great library like Rails helps attract developers to the language. Rails is the only example I can think of where a widely popular library (ostensibly) leads to fewer users of the language for other purposes.