> Sorry, but Ruby pretty much is Rails. Nope. That's like saying cycling pretty much is riding around on the street on sub $200 machines just because that's wh

> Sorry, but Ruby pretty much is Rails. Nope. That's like saying cycling pretty much is riding around on the street on sub $200 machines just because that's what most people do with a bicycle. To you there may be relatively little Ruby that isn't used in conjunction with Rails but that is not the same thing as saying that there is very little in an absolute sense. And surprisingly, the uses outside of Rails may be the most influential in terms of its direction and future as a language, thanks to the particular circumstances of Matz and what interests him. To cherry-pick an example, he is loathe to work on things that would have the side-effect of slowing Ruby's startup time. This is a tradeoff that is good for long-running server applications like J2EE stacks, but bad for writing scripts. Of course, there's JRuby which goes in the other direction. We'll see what happens with that kind of thing.