Predicting Rails with Google Trends
Since the Zed Shaw rant, everyone has been coming out of the wood work to say one of:
- Zed is a dick, and wrong
- Zed is a dick, and right
- Rails is OK, and here is why
- Rails is in trouble, and here is why
Tim Bray put his predictions out there, and Joe Gregorio responded.
One of the core problems with predicting the future, is knowing the present. When you look at “how successful Rails is” people use varying metrics:
- Woooah look at the book sales
- DHH is being really loud
- Look at the number of jobs out there
- Look at Google Trends
- I know a couple of people, and one of them is doing a startup in Rails
Obviously, they are all minor data points. To talk to Joe’s Google Trends hypothesis, you normally find that a technology takes off at some point, and lots of people start talking about it. Many of these people are not even using the technology. Some are checking it out for the first time. Some are ranting against it. A lot of this kind of talk has died down and Rails is maturing.
I am not going to predict anything about Rails. Who cares? We are seeing more projects coming online, and I have seen successful projects rolling out. When I do a new project, Rails is a serious contender, but sure it isn’t the only one.
Ok, one little prediction:
More live applications will be launched on Rails in 2008 than in 2007.
