I don't think .NET has to support different "types" of applications. I think just about anything you can build in .NET you could do in Ruby. Ruby has a bit of a

I don't think .NET has to support different "types" of applications. I think just about anything you can build in .NET you could do in Ruby. Ruby has a bit of a reputation for being on the slow side, and sometimes that can be an issue, but other than that, it's a general purpose language with a vibrant community, so in the end rather capable. I think the difference lies more in the cultures. .NET was born out of the largest software company in the world with billions at stake. That alone ensures it will be on the conservative side. Whereas Ruby was born more in the open source and start up community, it has more freedom to just go for it. Look at Rails 3, massive changes and a general attitude of "this new way of doing it is better, so buck up." Which is fine, perfectly fine, for Ruby. Microsoft would never get away with that (take ASP.NET 4 for example, they went to exhaustive lengths to make sure it can be ran in "legacy" mode). The jump from .NET 1.1 to 2.0 was a painful one, and so was 3.5 to 4, and Microsoft knows that. Yet they still maintain admirable backwards compatibility despite all of that. They took serious effort to make sure from 4 on, .NET releases can live side by side. I don't think your average Ruby framework/library/whatever would care so much.