Who Jumped on the Ruby on Rails Bandwagon?

Ruby on Rails was released around Fall 2004 by one David Heinemeier Hansson. He had been working on an application for 37Signals and extracted out a web framework. I heard of ROR in Fall 2005, so maybe a year later. Dave Thomas was already extolling its virtues as part of No Fluff Just Stuff. I heard DHH give a tutorial on it during ETECH in March 2006.

I attended Railsconf 2007 in Portland last week. I was curious to see who was attending. With 1600 attendees, I barely met half a dozen people, which is very tiny.

Among the things I pointed out was the numerous white folks at the conference. I think I eventually counted about 4-5 African Americans, though I'd be willing to believe the number was 2-3 times that much. I saw some Indians, some Asians, some women, but really, white males dominated this conference.

Does that mean ROR is racist or sexist?

I know. It's a silly remark to make. Ask yourself who would jump on the ROR bandwagon? You realize several things. First, ROR, as the first "R" so boldly says is "Ruby". Ruby, as you can tell by its name, is not Java. It's not C#. Heck, it's not even ASP or PHP. It's not C, nor C++. It's not even frickin' Scheme. This means that anyone who learns it is on their own, unless they want to create a RUG (Ruby User's Group).

Contrary to popular belief, not every working software developer is all that keen about what they do. As a profession, we have the dubious distinction of working in a field that reinvents itself every five years, and that's rough. It's not surprising that the video game generation has done so well as programmers, because they've learned to negotiate the minefield of learning to play one new video game after another. They learn that each game has new aspects, but all their old skills aren't useless, and can be applied to make heads or tails of this new game.

Still, most developers are content trying to do their job, and aren't particularly fascinated by learning new things, especially since many do maintenance code work. From that, a small percentage actually likes to learn new things, and from that, an even smaller percentage is willing to take the leap to work in this new arena. Sometimes, they're "lucky". The choice is made for them from above.

But what about everyone else? Those are the folks that make the leap to Ruby and to Rails even when no one else is doing it. And then, they have to shell out some bucks to attend Railsconf. Even folks on the Rails Core group didn't attend Railsconf, so you can imagine a reasonably hardcore developer might not bother to make the trip.

All told, the average Railsconf attendee is far from average. Someone work works with Ruby on Rails or is at least sufficiently fascinated to attend a relatively pricey conference. It's perhaps not surprising that this weeds out a fair number of people who could attend. Women, minorities, even those you might expect in larger numbers (Indians, Chinese, Korean, etc).

Dave Thomas pleaded with the community in his closing keynote to reach out. Surely he understands that the community, as is, is as new as new can be. These are the Pilgrims who abandoned culture to live in backwoods America, who gave up conveniences to rough it. It shouldn't be surprising that the community doesn't look like the community as a whole.

The question remains: how stable will this community be? Are they committed to it for a period of time? Or will we look for the next shiny new thing in 3-4 years? Java is now entering its 12th year (or so) of popular existence. Will Ruby and Rails last that long (yes, yes, Ruby was released prior to Java, so in that sense, the answer is already yes--but I mean in the popular sense).

How will this community evolve? When will it begin to reflect the development community at large, and will it begin to redefine what the community looks like?