Ruby is a widely used open-source programming language, valued for its simplicity, especially in web development. Despite its popularity, with over one million users on GitHub, little is known about the issues faced by Ruby developers. This study aims to investigate the key topics, trends, and difficulties faced by Ruby developers by analyzing over 498,000 Ruby-related questions on Stack Overflow (SO), followed by a survey of 154 Ruby developers. We employed BERTopic modeling and manual analysis to develop a taxonomy of 35 topics, grouped into six main categories. Our findings reveal that Web Application Development is the most commonly discussed category, while Ruby Gem Installation and Configuration Issues emerged as the most challenging topic. Analysis of trends on SO showed a steady decline. A survey of 154 Ruby developers demonstrated that 31.6% of the participants find the Core Ruby Concepts category particularly difficult, while Application Quality and Security is found to be difficult for over 40% of experienced developers. Notably, a comparison between survey responses and SO metrics highlights a misalignment, suggesting that perceived difficulty and objective indicators from SO differ; emphasizing the need for improved metrics to better capture developer challenges. Our study provides insights about the challenges Ruby developers face and strong implications for researchers.

翻译：Ruby是一种广泛使用的开源编程语言，以其简洁性备受推崇，尤其在Web开发领域。尽管其流行度颇高，在GitHub上拥有超过一百万用户，但Ruby开发者所面临的问题却鲜为人知。本研究旨在通过分析Stack Overflow（SO）上超过498,000条Ruby相关问题，并对154名Ruby开发者进行问卷调查，以探究Ruby开发者关注的关键主题、趋势与难点。我们采用BERTopic建模与人工分析相结合的方法，构建了一个包含35个主题的分类体系，并将其归纳为六大类别。研究发现，Web应用开发是最常讨论的类别，而Ruby Gem安装与配置问题则成为最具挑战性的主题。对SO趋势的分析显示相关讨论呈稳步下降态势。对154名Ruby开发者的调查表明，31.6%的参与者认为核心Ruby概念类别尤为困难，而超过40%的经验丰富开发者认为应用质量与安全领域存在难度。值得注意的是，调查反馈与SO指标的对比揭示了两者之间存在偏差，表明主观感知的困难度与SO的客观指标并不一致；这凸显了改进度量标准以更准确捕捉开发者挑战的必要性。本研究为理解Ruby开发者面临的挑战提供了深刻见解，并对研究者具有重要启示。