I am interested in learning Ruby sometime in the future.

Already know Python, Java and Javascript(including Node).

Is Ruby dead? Is it worth learning?

Ruby is definitely still alive and with learning. Especially with rails.

Ruby is a beautiful language but has scalability problems.

@nblackburn
Can you elaborate? How it is not scalable?

@clovisIrex Every web application that has reached a large size has had problems and have have had to move parts away to cope.

Hmm.. You already have 2 dynamic scripting Languages in your tool belt why not try something else like c++ or haskell or [insert random language here] . Just a Suggestion tho. Ruby is not a bad language but why learn ruby when you already know Python and Javascript if you have not specific use for it?

Ruby is my favorite programming language. It does a good job of staying out of your way and lets you do some cool stuff pretty easily.

Try rust or golang instead :)

@clovisIrex if you find ruby's syntax beautiful but want speed, fault tolerance and scalability you should consider picking up Elixir instead. Particularly for any soft-real time service it beats ruby no contest. Or node for that matter

Ruby is love
Ruby is life

and seriously, you wont run into scaling issues unless you're making the next Facebook or Twitter. And even then, there's always passenger, nginx, psql clusters, and load balancers. This really is not the large problem people make it out to be.

@Ashkin it really depends on the type of application. In some types of applications, like chat for example, you'll likely need horizontal scaling while maintaining state very early on. This is trouble in most of the languages/runtimes, but some excel in it.

But I agree that if you wanna design some sort of normal webpage/web app with no latency requirements then you can simply bring up more instances that share no state and interface with a single database. Should be fairly straightforward in any language.

@Ashkin No, that is all thanks to Twitter vilifying it but it does make trade offs in favor of developer experience for sure.

@nblackburn
Honestly, you can say the same about anything that isn't C, or even straight assembly. They all add overhead to make devs' lives easier.

@Ashkin Sure, even the idea of a programming language is overhead but you know what i mean though, pedantics aside :)

@JonnyCodewalker Assembly is human-readable machine code. True, modern processors convert assembly into the microcode they use internally, but that's beside the point as they're functionally identical, and you cannot write/execute microcode directly anyway.

C adds higher-level features that compile into probably what an advanced assembly programmer would write, plus optimizations automatically determined from the codebase. The language by itself doesn't add overhead because it's basically very fancy assembly. (Adding libraries, on the other hand... But doing that is little different from the following.)

However, other languages that compile into C or run on top of a C interpreter DO add overhead through layers of abstraction, custom objects and their handlers, etc. and that added overhead is often quite considerable. Ruby is one such example; php another.

@Ashkin I learned to program with assembly and learned Ruby as my first general purpose language. Unfortunately, I think Ruby really does have a scale issue, but more generally, performance issues. Given lightweight and more active communities in the NodeJS and Go communities, I'd argue that learning Ruby is a bit moot at this point. I wanna love Ruby, but I just don't see it having much of a future without a significant rewrite or paradigm shift.

@itsnameless *points to her shirt* 🤔😋