'It seems as if the rapid growth of Ruby has come to an end. If this is indeed the case, then also Ruby does not become the "next big programming language".'
The curve for Ruby shows a ground crawl of early adoption, from 2002 onward, followed by a climb in 2006 corresponding to the first wave of Rails books. The high end of the chart, Java and Visual Basic, show declines.
Your "headline" may just be an attempt to draw Rails community hits to the site. Ruby, and especially Rails, are only just starting.
Definitely not a conclusion I would draw from that chart.
06 = 19th, 07 = 10th. That is pretty fast growth to me.
I think the rate of adoption of Ruby and Rails is more limited by
available trained engineers than by demand.
Totally. I see job adds for RoR all the time, and at my day gig they
had to get a head-hunter just to collect resumes.
If the chart is biased for enterprise and corporate teams, and
established projects that must still add features, then it would under-
represent RoR's mindshare.
One can't help but love rails - but I have to say the major issue as I
see it is DEPLOYMENT, DEPLOYMENT, DEPLOYMENT. Until deployment is as
easy and universal as PHP it will never surpass PHP. I have said this
from the start and continue to say it. A lot of times with a rails
app you get all dressed up and have nowhere to go or you have to pay
more. Most providers that "support" rails don't do squat and you have
to figure everything out yourself with symbolic links and difficult,
if not impossible, setup. And God forbid you have a question. I have
to say I continue to wonder if rails isn't going to go the route of
Beta vs. VHS - Beta was better but VHS won due to one reason - market
integration and availability.
Does it matter how popular a language is, if it right for the job then
use it, if not use something else. You have all discovered a truly
fantastic language, if others don't follow, that doesn't make Ruby or
Rails a lesser Language or Framework. Ruby or Rails are not going to
disappear because some other language is more popular. As long as
there is a dedicated community contributing and getting excited about
them then they will live on.
Surely as demand for ruby/rails increases, providers will make it easier to deploy. This is the core of capitalism. As demand increases, supply does too. I reckon it won’t be too long before we can just upload everything from the project folder, and the job will be done.
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There is already deprec, that pretty much covers this problem on Ubuntu.
I'm working on another project right now
(http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyworks) that very soon will do the
same on RHEL and CentOS. ThoughtWorks will even offer commercial
support for those who need that warm and fuzzy feeling.
Plus, there is a number of decent hosting services, although most of
them are rather expensive so far. That's because Rails architecture
with it's relatively high RAM and CPU footprint doesn't fit all that
well into a cheap shared hosting model.
In other words, deployment is about to become a non-issue.
