Haha I was checking the comments precisely to see if this was the case. This happens nearly everywhere a language that isn't Java, Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, or JavaScript is used. IMO it has more to do with tech labor arbitrage[1] than anything technical. Even if a system is punching above its weight, over time, the Weird Language Choice spooks people enough that they get the rewrite bug.
Bleacher Report is a funny example: it used to be a darling example of Elixir, where a migration from Ruby -> Elixir claimed a move from "150 Ruby servers to 5 (probably overprovisioned) Elixir servers."[2] But then management and politics got scared, moved it all to more conventional tech, and the whole system suffered (see this legendary post[3]).
Fred Hebert describes a similar thing happening with a migration from Erlang deployments to Go/Docker/immutable, where you lose some pretty valuable capabilities by migrating to more conventional tech.[4]
I don't see this changing anytime soon -- we came of age when it was viable to attract investment with the promise of tech innovation. These days, those are liabilities because managers misunderstood the "Use Boring Technology" post the way consultants bartardized "Agile" (taking decent advice and misunderstanding it into something wholly different and horrifying). The result is you've got companies with customers in the 1000s using k8s, calling it "simple" and "Boring," whereas that same company would be called amateur if they did things like stateful deploys on-prem.[5]
Love your take on it. From a fellow prog languages enthusiast that matured, I can safely say that you are right.
I've coded in so many languages in my life, but the job market pull from Ruby always drags me back, with time, I began to really love and appreciate what Ruby is.
I still find Ruby a bit niche than other mainstream languages like Java and Python, I bet that if I had >5 years of Java, the Java market pull would be higher than Ruby and I'd be doing Java.
Bleacher Report is a funny example: it used to be a darling example of Elixir, where a migration from Ruby -> Elixir claimed a move from "150 Ruby servers to 5 (probably overprovisioned) Elixir servers."[2] But then management and politics got scared, moved it all to more conventional tech, and the whole system suffered (see this legendary post[3]).
Fred Hebert describes a similar thing happening with a migration from Erlang deployments to Go/Docker/immutable, where you lose some pretty valuable capabilities by migrating to more conventional tech.[4]
I don't see this changing anytime soon -- we came of age when it was viable to attract investment with the promise of tech innovation. These days, those are liabilities because managers misunderstood the "Use Boring Technology" post the way consultants bartardized "Agile" (taking decent advice and misunderstanding it into something wholly different and horrifying). The result is you've got companies with customers in the 1000s using k8s, calling it "simple" and "Boring," whereas that same company would be called amateur if they did things like stateful deploys on-prem.[5]
At least we'll always have WhatsApp.
[1]: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-lab... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170204160005/http://www.techwo... [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/erlang/comments/18f3kl3/comment/kct... [4]: https://ferd.ca/a-pipeline-made-of-airbags.html [5]: https://morepablo.com/2023/05/where-have-all-the-hackers-gon...