Audience question during the Why I Like Mentoring lightning talk. Why do we keep asking whether Ruby is dying? The speaker (Andrei) answers that in his experience companies move off Ruby because it's too slow, try JRuby, and now look at Rust. The question-asker counters that it may just be the cycle of new shiny things (e.g. the Elixir migration was real but other outflows have been smaller) and that Ruby developer counts are in fact increasing — just more slowly than Python. Ruby should probably not try to compete with Python on every niche (data science vs web), and ruby-web vs python-web popularity may be closer than headline numbers suggest.