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Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

7 points by companyhen ↗ HN
Hi,

I am considering joining Team Treehouse (http://teamtreehouse.com) and I saw they offer RoR tutorials. I was wondering if the language is still useful to learn in 2013? This may be a dumb question, but I have heard "bad" things about the language from people. I've been developing responsive WordPress themes over the past year and want to learn and try some new things. iOS Development is probably next on my list. I've been "learning" to code the past year on my own.

10 comments

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jennyjenjen
I think you're going to hear "bad" things about pretty much any language if you investigate it far enough.

What do you mean you've been "learning" to code? (Your use of quotation marks is curious.)

companyhen
I mean, I have gone through Codecademy, Udacity, Lynda, etc. but I still haven't written much of my own code besides some simple if/else scripts.

I usually just plug and play with prebuilt tools like Masonry.js and other jQuery/PHP libraries I find useful. So I'm not sure if that counts as actual programming.

I've always been a designer, and have come a long way on the programming side from where I started. I still have a long way to go, and Treehouse seems like it could be a great tool.

shire
I have a membership there also, RoR is very widely used by startups nowadays.
companyhen
How do you like it? I was thinking of trying out the Silver membership for a month and seeing how it goes.
nemrow
I attended the Launch conference in San Francisco this year and specifically asked many of the startups demoing their software what they wrote in. The majority of them were written in RoR. Also, if you are just starting out with programming in general, once you get the hang of Ruby (which is the backbone of RoR) rails will be the fastest way for you to get applications up and running on the web. I would go ahead and say "Yes" to choosing RoR. Best of luck!
nayefc
Rails is definitely the way to go. In fact, I would go far and say it may be the most popular framework with startups these days. Knowing how to design themes (I'm assuming you're a HTML,CSS,JS wiz), learning iOS and knowing Rails is the ultimate powerful skill-sets all combined.
otikik
Small correction: The language is called Ruby. "Ruby on Rails" is a framework built on top of it. You can learn (and use) Ruby without Rails.

As for its relevancy, it's simply the best way to get jobs in my region outside of Big Corp (where they want java or SAP).

Plus, it's fun.

robbrit
Ruby (and Rails) is as relevant as ever. The hype about it has died down, just like the hype of Java was dying when Ruby was becoming the Next Big Thing. Is Java still relevant today? (Yes) The hype around the technologies of today (Objective-C, Node.js) will die in a few years as well, it is unlikely that these languages will become irrelevant.

One of the great things about Rails these days is that many of the startups that were founded during the hype period of Ruby are now established companies: Twitter, Shopify, Groupon, Github, LivingSocial, Zendesk. If startups are not your thing, these are just a few examples of many larger companies looking (desperately) for people with Ruby on Rails talent.

hkarthik
Rails is still relevant, but it's worth having a high performance language in your back pocket to deal with those high scale problems that Rails is just not very good at.

Many developers have started leaning on Java, Clojure, Scala, Erlang, Node.js or Go to fill this role.

If you're just starting out and want to build something that can gain traction, Rails is a fine choice. Just don't abuse it.

dragonwriter
> I am considering joining Team Treehouse (http://teamtreehouse.com) and I saw they offer RoR tutorials. I was wondering if the language is still useful to learn in 2013? This may be a dumb question, but I have heard "bad" things about the language from people.

Ruby on Rails isn't a language, its a framework. Ruby the language and Rails the framework are both still relevant in web application development (and, Ruby, somewhat beyond that domain), though there are also plenty of other options, both for languages and frameworks.