FWIW, at one place I worked there was a table anyone could dump a book on for others to "borrow". No real expectation of getting it back, but a way to pass on unwanted books to someone who might find it useful.

I wanted to reduce my collection of books. So I dumped a less-popular Ruby book onto that table. It vanished before the end of the day. I dumped a couple other ruby books, including The Ruby Way and some book on Ruby brain-teaser quizes, something like that. Poof, as if done by a magician trying to impress members of the opposite sex, they vanished quickly and completely, by the next time I passed through that room. Interesting.

Then I dumped Andrei Alexandrescu's The D Programming Language. It sat for a day, then another day, and another. After a week it was still there. Eventually someone took it. At least at this one company, D is 1/100th as popular as Ruby. Neither language is used officially on company projects - it's all Java, C++, C# and Python. Internal web sites do not use RoR that I know of.

Ruby is a fine language, but in practical implementation other languages, in particular, Python run circles around it. A circle. Maybe half a circle, but you know what I mean - Ruby is fine but never in first place. I still use it for some electronics graphics (http://www.darenscotwilson.com/spec/stereo888/stereo888.html) It's certainly not dying if there are such quick book-snatchers in a company not using it.

OTOH, those who know of D like it quite well, actually use it, try to spread the word, and that includes me. Maybe D is in the stage of early growth outside it's originating community, where Ruby was in 199x where I'm not sure what 'x' is.

D is clearly growing, but has a long way to go, while Ruby is way up there, and has a long way to go if it is in fact shrinking.

When I am a multi-billionaire, I will build a giant monument, 100 miles wide, fifty tall, and engrave on it all over every tweet and facebook post ever written since the 1990s, through all of the 21st century, so our descendants one thousand years in the future will not lose all that precious wisdom and insight into our culture.

When my university's library expanded in the late 1980s, I wondered about two things: in another two or three decades, will they need to expand again? Of course. And also: Who is going to read or look up info in all those books? Of course, there will always be specialists and indexes and catalogs, but if the trend continues for all the 21st Century, and all of the 22nd Century, ..., at some point there will be far too much "literature" even in a very narrow academic specialty for any human to make use of. Then what about all the non-academic stuff, cheap romance novels and mysteries and memoirs of flash-in-the-pan pseudo-celebrities?

It's not that we need a good ol' roaring book-burning now and then like at Alexandria long ago, but somehow the best needs to be brought to the top, and the most of the mediocre disposed of. And maybe keep mediocre writers from ever starting. (Stuff that's actually *bad* not merely mediocre - keep some as examples and for the entertainment value!)

So now we have disks and all manner of extremely dense storage materials. This changes nothing, aside from the physical space requirements are reduced to near nothing. Even with intelligent indexes and indexes of indexes, or miraculously good search engines such as Google, or whatever we'll have in fifty years - it's mind-boggling to wonder how such a huge growing pile of information will be utilized.