alt Hacker Newsdon't take this the wrong way, but -- people still use ruby?
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For pretty much everything. My terminal is in Ruby, with a Ruby font renderer, running Ruby shell, and my editor is in Ruby, my window manager, my file manager.
(Yes, I'm taking it a bit far; my prototype Ruby compiler is self-hosting finally, so I guess sometime in the next 20 years I'll end up booting into a Ruby kernel for no good reason...)
People should. I seriously miss using it at my day job. It's not for code where type systems make things a lot more stable, but it's great for scripting and quick things. Also ORMs in ruby are truly nice, and I haven't found anything as good anywhere else.
Generally speaking Ruby has the best APIs.
Ruby on Rails is the GOAT. Nothing comes close in joy and productivity, even in 2026.
I use Rails for many of my side projects. Because of the emphasis on convention over configuration, Rails codebases tend to be succinct with minimal boilerplate, which keeps context windows small. That in turn makes it great for agent-assisted work.
For web stuff, with server-side rendering and partials it means minimal requirement to touch the hot mess that is JavaScript, and you can build PWAs that feel native pretty easily with Hotwire.
Ruby is slow as fuck though, so there's a tradeoff there.
It's my daily language and I don't even use rails nowadays.
What’s the right way to take this?
ruby and rails is the only stuff that keep me doing web development.
when I touch js, and python... I prefer ONLY AI agentic style of working.
Absolutely yes, all over the place! Startups are building greenfield software with Rails as we speak. Loads of established businesses have Ruby applications that are quietly chugging along doing their jobs well. & Shopify, a company with $1.6 billion in annual revenue, uses Ruby _very_ heavily & also invests in the wider Ruby ecosystem.
Ruby is not without its drawbacks & drama, but it’s elegant in a way that few languages are to this day (how many JS programmers _actually_ grok prototype-based object-orientation?) & compared to NPM, RubyGems is (lately) unexciting in the best way.