Is Ruby Still a 'Serious' Programming Language?

Wired published an article by California-based writer/programmer Sheon Han arguing that Ruby 'is not a serious programming language.'

Han believes that the world of programming has 'moved on', and 'everything Ruby does, another language now does better, leaving it without a distinct niche.

Ruby is easy on the eyes. Its syntax is simple, free of semicolons or brackets. More so even thanPython — a language known for its readability — Ruby reads almost like plain English... Ruby, you might've guessed, is dynamically typed. Python and JavaScript are too, but over the years, those communities have developed sophisticated tools to make them behave more responsibly. None of Ruby's current solutions are on par with those. It's far too conducive to what programmers call 'footguns,' features that make it all too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

Critically, Ruby's performance profile consistently ranks near the bottom (read: slowest) among major languages. You may remember Twitter's infamous 'fail whale,' the error screen with a whale lifted by birds that appeared whenever the service went down. You could say that Ruby was largely to blame. Twitter's collapse during the 2010 World Cup served as a wake-up call, and the company resolved to migrate its backend to Scala, a more robust language.

The move paid off: By the 2014 World Cup, Twitter handled a record 32 million tweets during the final match without an outage. Its new Scala-based backend could process up to 100 times faster than Ruby. In the 2010s, a wave of companies replaced much of their Ruby infrastructure, and when legacy Ruby code remained, new services were written in higher-performance languages.

You may wonderwhy people are still using Ruby in 2025. It survives because of its parasitic relationship with Ruby on Rails, the web framework that enabled Ruby's widespread adoption and continues to anchor its relevance.... Rails was the framework of choice for a new generation of startups. The main code bases of Airbnb, GitHub, Twitter, Shopify, and Stripe were built on it.

He points out on Stack Overflow's annual developer survey, Ruby has slipped from a top-10 technology in 2013 to #18 this year — 'behind evenAssembly' — calling Ruby 'a kind of professional comfort object, sustained by the inertia of legacy code bases and the loyalty of those who first imprinted upon it.' But the article drew some criticism on X.com. ('You should do your next piece about how Vim isn't a serious editor and continue building your career around nerd sniping developers.')

Other reactions...

'Maybe WIRED is just not a serious medium...'
'FWIW — Ruby powered Shopify through another Black Friday / Cyber Monday — breaking last year's record.'
'Maybe you should have taken a look at TypeScript...'

Wired's subheading argues that Ruby 'survives on affection, not utility. Let's move on.' Are they right? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.

Is Ruby still a 'serious' programming language?

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