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Ruby Ruby Basics Ruby Syntax Methods

Posted by Wilson Gardner
Wilson Gardner
20,464 Points

Will there be more/newer Ruby courses?

I'm just curious if Ruby is basically being phased out? With the release of Rails 6 on the horizon I am excited about the potential future of Ruby. Most of the courses at Treehouse are a little dated and I wondered if there would be new content coming?

2 Answers

Jay McGavren
STAFF
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher
Jay McGavren
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher

At this point, we are unfortunately not seeing the kind of demand that will allow us to create new Ruby content. Core Ruby doesn't change that much from version to version, so we are leaving the existing content up for now, as it tends to age pretty well. Rails might be another matter. We will have to see how many breaking changes Rails 6 introduces.

Wilson Gardner
Wilson Gardner
20,464 Points

Hey Jay,

Thanks for the swift response. That makes me a little sad that there's not really a demand for it. I know other languages like Python are taking the spotlight these days, but Rails particularly is widely used on the web for applications and websites.

What do you see down the road for Ruby / Rails? Do you think it is fading in popularity and will soon be replaced by other languages like Python?

Jay McGavren
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher
Jay McGavren
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher

Personally, I would never do web development in anything besides Rails. IMO no other language manages the complexity of web dev as well as Ruby.

But developers (really, people in general) are a fickle bunch. The fitness of a language rarely decides its popularity.

The overall trend does seem to indicate a decrease in popularity for Ruby. I don't understand the reasons in the least.

Kurt L
Kurt L
22,856 Points
Kurt L
Kurt L
22,856 Points

Ruby should be promoted more effectively in colleges, universities, and in domains like data science. It's a very elegant language. For example, because of Ruby blocks (which Python lacks), Sinatra has one fewer line for every method call compared to Flask. In Jay's video on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFEPkXybAlo, he explains the advantages of Ruby over Java, but not over Python. A follow-up video comparing Sinatra to Flask would really showcase Ruby's elegance. Here's a "Hello, world" app in the two languages:

Python/Flask:

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def hello():
    return 'Hello, World!'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

Ruby/Sinatra:

require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
  'Hello, World!'
end