Yeah. PHP and Ruby are contemporaries; I shouldn't have described it as "newer". But I would argue that unlike PHP, which was crude but useful right from the be

Yeah. PHP and Ruby are contemporaries; I shouldn't have described it as "newer". But I would argue that unlike PHP, which was crude but useful right from the beginning, Ruby took a long time to gestate. It's only really in the last few years that Ruby's made the transition from enjoyable academic plaything to serious tool. And let's face it, we needed to wait that long for computers to become fast enough to run it ... ; ) But now, there's an astonishing amount of development and innovation surrounding Ruby. Look at MacRuby, for example - if that isn't a vote of confidence I don't know what is. In my opinion, the language is only just beginning to properly hit its stride. Who knows what will happen. Ruby might fail to gain critical mass, of course. But my point was that the OP's assertion that Ruby had tried and failed to make its mark is very premature. The Rails hype might have died down but from my perspective Ruby has more momentum than ever.