duck monster posted:

Oh Perl stopped being a major player a long long time ago, a combination of people finding other languages (ruby for a while, then python) a bit more ergonomic to maintain without having to learn too much about the language itself. Its a powerful multifaceted toolbox of a language. But frankly most older Perl is a loving nightmare to maintain unless you live breathe and dream in regex.

Rubys strength is its weakness. Its really great for defining little DSLs in and creating highly magic based libraries. The problem with magic though, is when it goes wrong, its loving impossible to debug. And Rubys killer app, Rails, was the king of that. If you made a NATO standard regulation web app, that wasnt too dependent on its awful ORM, it was phenomenal. But as soon as poo poo gets weird in your requirements and you have to color outside the lines, Rails kinda falls apart conceptually and suddenly those neat natural-languageish lines turn into a metaprogramming clusterfuck

Productiveity wise though it'll clean the clock out of any language you could throw at it. Honestly, the hipsters abandoned Ruby for NodeJS because most of them are loving stupid. Its no wonder Python took off. NodeJS creates unmaintainable messes, and Rails just isnt cool anymore. Python was innevitable (yes I know its probably the oldest language of all of them. The hipsters dont know that)