It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.
It's dropped in relative popularity, but the demand feels like it's still increasing to me (been doing Ruby professionally since 2006), just not as fast as some of the other languages.
Keep in mind the number of developers overall is rising rapidly still.
Compare that to Rust. For all the hype it has, very few companies are shipping products with it. There are a few, but nowhere near as many as are using Ruby.
I get your point but it's a case of right tool for the job. Every copy of Ruby now includes YJIT written in Rust because Rust is the right tool for that task.
It's easy to forget though that number of lines of code required to do something is also a valid metric and Ruby beats Rust on that.
So if you're shipping CRUD web apps that might be a more important metric than say memory usage or CPU time.
Different job, different tool. More people want to ship web apps than write their own JITs.
That's probably true, but also a poor measure of success. I bet there are more companies using Ruby than there are companies using C++, too. They fill different niches, and different types of companies deliver very different products using those languages.
The ratio of people who can code in Python or Ruby to people who can code in Rust or C++ is very high.
I don’t know why “number of companies using language X” is a metric that is used here. Wordpress is serving 43% of websites on the internet as of 2025, so we should all be learning PHP!
That's very nice, but not in itself a good argument for language use. If you count using a system written in a language, then almost every programmer uses Ruby daily as both Github and Gitlab are written in Ruby. Similarly you probably interact quite frequently with (banking) systems written in COBOL, but nobody would call COBOL a popular language.
Ruby will always have a special place in my heart. I cut my teeth as a young programmer on that language, and I learnt its value (as well as the value of using something else) along the way.
Ruby code can be downright poetic, for better or worse. There's a certain kind of magic to the kind of code it enables. That's not always good, but it _is_ beautiful.
I encourage everybody to read the venerable "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" [1] to see what I'm talking about.
I wish Ruby was cross-platform. It still only works on Windows using the MSYS2 emulation layer, and the only reason as far as I can tell is that it committed hard and early to `fork()` as the main way to use multiple cores.
Over the last 10 years the number of programmers has grown enormously. So ruby dropping in position does not necessarily imply the absolute number of ruby programmers went down.
It is somewhat objectively true:
https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages
https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/GitHub-Octove...
It doesn't mean much, and this library can be reproduced in any of those top 10 languages from what I can tell.