That's cool, and I'm happy for you that you are in a position that allows you to get income from other sources, so that you can write OS code in your spare time.
Not everyone can or wants to go this way, though, and we got a number of fantastic tools and libraries thanks to people who tried and succeeded in making money from open source. Some folks live off donations, some are paid by their employers to write OS, and some added extra features that allowed them to both offer their tools for free and to monetize them at the same time. It's sad that the last path starts to disappear, at least for some tools. In the end it probably will result in fewer OS libraries, because some number of authors will have to either find another income stream, or abandon their projects.
I used Oh My Zsh for years, but there were literally 3-4 features I relied on: autocompletion, git plugin, history search, and one theme.
For some reason it was slow to load which I found annoying, so I used Claude Code to optimize it. In the end I ended up removing Oh My ZSH entirely, now I have a single .zshrc file that contains everything, and it became much faster.
Similarly I moved from Packer to Lazy.nvim and updated a number of libraries, and from iTerm to Ghostty, Claude Code essentially converted my configs in a matter of minutes
The difference is that jQuery was replaced by other libraries, while Tailwind grows in popularity, but due to AI its creator doesn’t benefit from this popularity as much as before
jQuery was essentially replaced by JavaScript (and browser compatibility) getting better, but it continued to exist and grow because it was the de facto way to DOM manipulation, especially if you had to copy and paste off of Stack Overflow, or roll out a framework based UI.
Tailwind being the default choice for AI UIs is not that different, it can continue to grow in usage but the fundamental need for Tailwind has passed.
The difference is jquery went away because better things replaced it (in javascript). If the fundamental need for tailwind has passed why is it's usage growing? It's more that the problem solved by the paid portion of tailwind is now solved by AI.
I don’t think the language itself is Japanese centric. In the past the discussions among the language development often happened in Japanese, but I don’t think it’s the case anymore (though I don’t follow it closely) since there are a lot of international core language contributors now
Historically - like, way back - a lot of the Ruby core chatter happened on a japanese mailing list, and that's where a lot of decisions ended up taking place, or it wasn't uncommon to have sudden hard subjects bombdrop on the english side while a lot of discussion already happened on the mailing list already so it was hard to catch up.
These days it seems like bugs.ruby-lang.org has most of the chatter.
A lot of bootcamps taught Ruby and Rails in the mid-2010s, so it hasn’t been stagnant for 15 years, maybe since 2017-2018. Then Python (with DS and ML domains exploding) and JS/TS (with Node and React) left Ruby far behind.
You can’t have it all at once. Hopefully one day there’s an alternative OS that’s not owned by and American company, but that shouldn’t stop us from building other things in the meantime
In short (all below is my opinion): it was popular in academia and got some corporate adoption, so when ML exploded in popularity it was a natural choice as the scripting language for ML tooling. On top of that it’s easy to pick up as a language, and it’s a general purpose language - there are lots of scientific tools like pandas written in it, there are web frameworks, etc.
Perl was too quirky for wide adoption and it stopped developing (Raku/Perl 6 took to long to develop), PHP was focused purely on the web, similarly JS. Ruby could have won, I like it more than Python, but outside of Japan it’s also mostly been associated with web development (because of Rails), it also lacked libraries that Python already had.
I had a Roomba+Braava Jet for a few years and I constantly had some issues with both devices, but the worst part was that in theory they should be working well together. There's this function "linked cleaning" where Braava mops the floor right after Roomba finishes vacuuming. But in practice it often didn't work, either the automation didn't trigger, or Roomba got stuck somewhere, cancelled the cleaning, and then Braava started mopping floor that hadn't been vacuumed.
Eventually I moved to Roborock with vacuum+mop in a single device. It still has its issues, but it is ten times better. It's able to lift the mop on the carpet, the mop is self-cleaning, and it has a large tank so that I only have to refill the water once a week instead of every other day. Day and night. Roomba eventually introduced a similar model, but it's been years after competitors had them.
If I remember it well, every once in a while a new cool feature was also breaking stuff, doubling the chances of getting to the top page here. But truth being told, GitHub was fixing those at light speed too and it was very interesting to follow their progress. Their delivery pipeline (per branch, deliver when ready, etc.) sounded very much innovative by then and I think inspired many people.
This is actually an interesting space, and I think there's a room for such products. Large companies struggle a lot with their knowledge bases, and discoverability is part of the problem (especially when using multiple tools: Confluence, Docs, Chat app, etc.)
The problem here is that there are companies that focus on this area and keep improving their products, while for OpenAI it's one of dozens of tools they launch, so it's hard to believe they'll keep dedicating adequate resources to make this a mature tool that's worth the investment (in form of time and money) for the clients
Not everyone can or wants to go this way, though, and we got a number of fantastic tools and libraries thanks to people who tried and succeeded in making money from open source. Some folks live off donations, some are paid by their employers to write OS, and some added extra features that allowed them to both offer their tools for free and to monetize them at the same time. It's sad that the last path starts to disappear, at least for some tools. In the end it probably will result in fewer OS libraries, because some number of authors will have to either find another income stream, or abandon their projects.
reply