The lack of such contributions -in general- or the speed at which they appear, is what leads me to conclude that the Ruby community is slowing down.

In this case, suddenly there's an awesome library for Ruby. Which is fantastic. An achievement to be very thankful for. But "the community" "produced" this months or years after such libs landed for Python, JS, TS, Rust, Go and so on.

Not just ML/AI, same happens for "gems" (Ruby libs) that deal with any new tech. It used to be that any SAAS or startup would offer official Rubygems from the get-go. Often before offering other platforms or languages. Today, when I want or need to integrate something, from notion to slack to cloudflare: no Ruby option or at least no official one.

This saddens me. Ruby is so much more than Rails (for which I can understand the reluctance or "hate"). Ruby is so much nicer to work in than Python and certainly than JavaScript. Ruby could easily have been what Python is today and tens of thousands of developers would be just a little happier than they are now, I am certain.

It’s also recently on the rise in general.

On the one hand, you praise Ruby, and lament that it gains such libraries so much later than other languages.

On the other hand...if you were paying attention to the "Python, JS, TS, Rust, Go and so on" ecosystems, and noticed the ML/AI work, why didn't you create one for Ruby yourself?

I guarantee that whatever answer you give doesn't matter, because every other Rubyist has their own reply. A "community" begins with one person doing the thing.

The average Ruby dev works at a mid to small sized company, probably a startup, and they are usually contributing to some proprietary SaaS product on top of Rails. Progress is always happening in the Ruby / Rails world but it's really slow.

On the other hand, Python has three popular web frameworks and a huge data tooling ecosystem that just keeps getting better. It's just easier to get things done with Python these days and the gap is so huge that I can understand OP.

And a community thrives with many one-persons combining their effort and keep doing so.

I have made many libraries (gems), OpenSource. Some paid, many just for the benefit of this community; your implication that I lament but not put my work and effort up is frankly rather offending.

To continue on this lament: libraries in dynamic languages are rather hard to maintain, due to runtime constraints that progress/change over time. And the one thing I see is a dwindling usage. Less issues filed (good! ;), less downloads, less integrations, less praise, etc etc.

The more I pay attention, the more I see the Ruby community dwindling. I hope this is merely Rails dwindling - I frankly won't mind if Rails is replaced -, but I fear that Ruby = Rails in practicality. And that Ruby is on the way to the COBOL or Perl.

This, I lament, because I think Ruby is, in the niche of dynamic scripting languages, by far the nicest, cleanest and fun to work with. It's tooling and syntax far more consistent and sensible than Pythons. It's concepts far better thought out and much nicer executed than PHPs. And, sorry, everything can be better than JavaScript without much effort.

So, to me it makes no sense to make Ruby the next Python or PHP, because it's already much better, IMO. It's just not used as often. One extra person using it, doesn't change that.

And, it makes even less sense to make Ruby more like Go or Rust, because if I need Rust, I'd pick Rust instead of spending years of my life making Ruby more like Rust (i.e. invest in a type system, some compile stuff etc).

And when I need e.g. WASM runtime (in say serverless functions) or integration of some new fancy SAAS, or LangChain alike tooling, why would I poor months or years of effort into building tooling to compile to WASM, build gems around said SAAS, or help with tools like Transformers for Ruby, when I can pick Go or Rust to compile to wasm today, grab the Typescript package for the SAAS today, or learn, use (and dislike) Langchain in python today as well?

I've just started replacing my shell with a shell in Ruby too. To me one of the nice things about Ruby is that I feel like I can get things done so easily it doesn't matter if the community is smaller. Almost all the code I use apart from the kernel, Chrome and Xorg is now my own.

My file manager is (very simplistic, I do most of my actual file management from the shell - it's in effect mostly a desktop launcher) Ruby

It, as well as my desktop switcher (also Ruby) depends on pure Ruby X11 bindings, and a pure Ruby TrueType font renderer:

  https://github.com/vidarh/skrift
  https://github.com/vidarh/skrift-x11
  https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11

My editor is also pure Ruby, using Rouge (Ruby; not mine) for syntax highlighting. That also needs a major update on Github - what's there probably won't even run for others because my personal "ecosystem" on my system is full of helpers and these things are written to be as minimalist as possible so e.g. my editors "file open" dialog is a 2-3 line wrapper around dmenu.

And I've just replaced my shell with Ruby - but that's just for interactive use, so it's very tiny.

Everything is ML focused now, and python is unfortunately the language most data scientists prefer.

I mentioned a few already. Some more that I recently ran into, are in the niche of "verifiable credentials", SSI and DIID. A weird niche, but relevant to my current work.

There's plenty of work, references, implementations, type-systems for TS, Rust, Python and even .net. But nothing significant (a very few experiments at most) in Ruby.

There's little support for WASM, eventhough that's a promising tech to run and manage backend stuff as well as maybe someday client-side stuff already. There's little tooling to manage cloud infra in Ruby (Chef and Puppet still chugging along, but hardly as omnipresent as Ansible etc)

PHP, Python, Typescript: typing is emerging everywhere, albeit "bolted on". Ruby has efforts in this direction, but far behind the ones mentioned above.

There's no practical "frameworks" or libraries to make games. Very few frameworks or tooling to build desktop software. There's little effort around architectural concepts like Event Sourcing, Hexagonal architecture, Actors and so on. They are there, but I suspect overshadowed by Rails and far less used and documented than their counterparts in other ecosystems.

Another problem was lack of concurrency, I don't know if that is still an issue today.

But having worked with PHP and Python, who having typing annotations like Ruby can have through addons (sorbet) and might get to core someday, I would not go back to Ruby if it got this.

Typing annotations in PHP or Python are hardly useful to me. Their net benefits aren't there for me.

So, rather than trying to make Ruby (or Python, or PHP) like Rust, or .net or Java, why not just pick Rust, .net or Java instead? When I don't need typing, I'll gladly pick ruby still. But when I do, I don't want to shoehorn Ruby into something it was never designed to be, but instead pick an option that has typing designed into its core.

Not every language needs/should have static typing, so sounds like you just found a better language for your own needs, doesn't mean Ruby has to change. Personally I think it's perfect as it is :)

I’m not surprised at all that the ruby ecosystem is dying, people have been complaining about its magic-ness for a decade and it’s still a problem today.

I still want to try and combine ahoy with a column store in postgres so that we can run the analytical queries straight onto postgres instead of syncing the events to BigQuery.

I've tried using pg_analytics by Paradedb but they don't support json columns, which is necessary with ahoy. Performance wise that would be ideal though.

If you are looking for anything ML related with Ruby ankane has usually had a look already ...