Good lord man, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and the web is not simply "apps". If you think Rails is irrelevant today than you are practicing fad-driven-development moreso than developing any real insight about the lay of the software land.
Yes. The rest of the world has moved on. If you've characterized what I am saying here as "web is simply apps", then you do not understand what I am saying.
I've written this in one other comment, I suppose I will repeat myself:
(1) There are more mobile units being sold than personal computers.
(2) More importantly, there are 2 year olds whose first experience with a personal computing device will be a smartphone or a tablet. When the start going to school, they will be forced to use a keyboard and will resent it. They will see this as a problem to be solved, and will solve it. This is a generation gap, something between 10 - 18 years from now.
(3) Our generation tend to think of the "web" as experienced primarily through a desktop or a laptop. We also like to think that we are at the cutting edge. We are not: these two year olds are.
(4) Rails is designed and used by people who experience the "web" through a desktop, and refuses to see where the world will be heading in the following years.
There are a lot more.
So yes. The direction Rails is going will lead it to its irrelevance.
Sorry I was severely jetlagged when I posted that and don't remember wth I was thinking.
At any rate, I don't see mobile-first making Rails irrelevant. Rails has never been cutting edge on front-end development except at the very very beginning when they bundled the brand-new Prototype library. But by the time they hit 1.0, seven years ago or whatever it was, they were already going down dead-end alleys like RJS in an attempt to avoid javascript. Since then Rails hasn't done anything amazing with front-end development, but they've stayed relevant in their own way with the asset pipeline, coffeescript, and generally staying out of your way to implement whatever front-end strategy you like.
Server-side development isn't going anywhere, so I don't see how the shift to mobile makes Rails irrelevant.
Good lord man, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and the web is not simply "apps". If you think Rails is irrelevant today than you are practicing fad-driven-development moreso than developing any real insight about the lay of the software land.