> Yukihiro Matsumoto could be an exception but as you rightfully pointed Ruby always remained somewhat niche even after its move to Heroku in San Francisco.
I'm not sure what you mean in terms of "its move to Heroku in San Francisco". Also, Ruby didn't "fail" and it's not niche (GitHub is written in RoR, as well as discourse). However, I would argue that Ruby remained relatively niche outside Japan until it was discovered by DHH and used for the Ruby on Rails framework (to this date, it's somewhat hard to find work in Ruby outside of RoR). DHH lived in Denmark at the time but moved to the US shortly thereafter.
When I checked, it seemed that Yukihiro Matsumoto moved to San Francisco to work for Heroku but that's after developing Ruby while in Japan.
> Ruby didn't "fail" and it's not niche (GitHub is written in RoR, as well as discourse).
Ruby definitely is a niche language. I have never seen used outside of the web and it's pretty much always mentioned with RoR. That doesn't preclude success stories developed with Ruby to exist.
It failed in the sense that it has little momentum and didn't gain much traction if you compare it to something like Python. In a way, it's somewhat comparable to Ocaml which was the "failure" I was mentioning initially despite being a nice language itself and seeing interesting development right now.
> When I checked, it seemed that Yukihiro Matsumoto moved to San Francisco to work for Heroku but that's after developing Ruby while in Japan.
I didn't actually know that, so fair enough. Still, I think DHH probably had a larger impact in popularising Ruby in the US (and, by extension, other parts of the world).
> Ruby definitely is a niche language. I have never seen used outside of the web
That's only if you consider the web to be "niche" and if you do that, then JavaScript is "niche" too.
It's true that Ruby outside of Ruby on Rails is somewhat rare, but several other successful technologies are other written in Ruby, for example:
- Homebrew (macOS package manager)
- Chef (server provisioning software)
- Vagrant (VM provisioning software)
- Cocoapods (iOS package manager)
> It failed in the sense that it has little momentum and didn't gain much traction if you compare it to something like Python. In a way, it's somewhat comparable to Ocaml [...]
I think you're way off base.
Yes, Python is extremely popular and Ruby can't compare overall - although I have a feeling that Ruby still overtakes Python when it comes to web dev, but obviously Python is huge in other areas and is also not exactly niche in web either.
But Ruby is #13 on TIOBE, while OCaml doesn't even feature in the top 50. Github and Discourse are only examples, we could also mention Airbnb, Shopify, Kickstarter, Travis CI and many others. I've personally worked at several Ruby companies, in fact I maintain a small Ruby codebase even now at my current company (although it's not our main language), etc.
Ruby had huge momentum in the 2000s and even early 2010s. It didn't catch on in the enterprises much, true, but it was the cool thing back when everyone was annoyed at the complexity of Java EE or the mess that was PHP back then. Ruby was also the language Twitter was originally written in before they migrated to Scala. It lost a significant amount of momentum since then and basically all of the hype (people migrated to Node, then later to Elixir, Clojure and co. and some like me jumped back to statically typed languages once they became more ergonomic), but it's still maintained by quite a sizeable number of companies.
More than that, RoR had an outsized influence on the state of current backend frameworks to the point where I claim that even one of the most heavily used frameworks today, Spring Boot, takes a lot of inspiration from it (while, of course, being also very different in many areas). I would also argue that Ruby inspired Groovy, which in turn inspired Kotlin, and that internal DSLs such as RSpec also were emulated by a number other languages later.
I'm not sure what you mean in terms of "its move to Heroku in San Francisco". Also, Ruby didn't "fail" and it's not niche (GitHub is written in RoR, as well as discourse). However, I would argue that Ruby remained relatively niche outside Japan until it was discovered by DHH and used for the Ruby on Rails framework (to this date, it's somewhat hard to find work in Ruby outside of RoR). DHH lived in Denmark at the time but moved to the US shortly thereafter.