Is Ruby dying?

Going by that graph it would seem almost everything is going down except the TypeScript and C++ which are the only two that are slightly increasing.

PHP taking just as big of a nosedive as Ruby is.
 
Several of the largest languages in the graph are essentially web only, including JS, TS and PHP. So, I'm assuming that much of the Ruby stats are from Rails usage. Rails as a framework is probably getting less popular due to the growth of alternatives such as Node and Go. And the death of the traditional web MVC pattern that Rails is tied to. So yeah, those technologies are just getting old and aren't as useful anymore. Languages like Java ground themselves in stability rather than presenting themselves as the bleeding edge. However, Rails kind of was the bleeding edge, and the bleeding edge is rather fickle.
 
Legend has it that Rails is extremely slow, even slower than PHP.
Some people are working on a language called Crystal which is inspired by Ruby, but is supposed to be far faster, although it never really gained any traction.

To rank languages by web performance, it goes:
C / C++ (still supreme no matter how you try to bend things, although it's too easy to screw up) > Go > C# > Python > JavaScript > PHP > Ruby.

I'm not even going to mention Rust because I find it's syntax impenetrable lol

The other problem with Ruby is that it's not a C Style Language which makes it much harder to learn than Go which is deliberately designed to look familiar to anyone who has been programming for more than a week.

C, C++, C#, JavaScript and PHP are all C Style Languages.

The main reason people embraced Ruby was because PHP sites were getting hacked left and right and Rails appeared to be the solution to their problems.
That is to say that they adopted it because it was secure rather than due to the merits of the language.

Another problem with Rails is that a good portion of the libraries you're going to be using don't support Windows which means that you're likely going to have to develop in a virtual machine.
 
Python is an interesting case. Like Go, it can basically be used for just about anything and the scientific community absolutely adore it, and it's supposed to be one of Google's main programming languages.

You can use it to make games, build GUIs, build websites, in robotics (I believe), etc.

https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python

Go is expanding into a bunch of places. Some people use it in IoT devices including in surveillance cameras, slightly odd, but there's always something interesting going on. It looks like it might be making head-way into the gaming industry next.

https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go

Neither of those two are web exclusive languages, I find that to be a good thing as it's nice to not be boxed into doing one thing, it's far harder to just fall out of fashion one day.

And TypeScript is basically a type-safe JavaScript. It transpiles to JavaScript.
I personally don't find it worth the hassle, but it's gaining popularity in some circles, perhaps in part due to the hype from Deno.

In my opinion, TypeScript suffers from the same problem as Hacklang.
It tries to be too similar to JavaScript while really not being similar at all in a bunch of areas.
I'd rather transpile Go to JavaScript, if only that didn't produce megabyte sized files 😛
 
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