same thing happened to Ruby as well. and to Python. and to Java. .net is a different thing, lot people were just forced into it. before the vast majority reall

same thing happened to Ruby as well. and to Python. and to Java. .net is a different thing, lot people were just forced into it. before the vast majority really accepts some technology, early adopters come in. they figure out better ways of doing stuff. until someone has a success story, people doubt new technologies. Ruby brought us a great object model and introduced a lot of perl / php people, or simply web developers shifting from anything else to metaprogramming. probably, until i faced Ruby, coming from .net / java background, i didn't know (that much) about it. neither about dynamic typing. closure is - yet - another language, that's quite true. we don't speak much of a performance here (even though it seems to be great), hence it does introduce us to functional programming and makes us think differently about objects and persistence. it doesn't mean that you have to quit your job and start looking for haskel / closure / scheme / lisp job. it means that you _may_ benefit just from knowing how stuff works there. remember s-expressions in Lisp? they nicely fit into .net expression trees, no surprise. smalltalk object model did work for Ruby. you may benefit from traits from scala in your Ruby code. and so on. so, until there's some success story and bunch of libraries / great codebase / frameworks for development, most of people will stay aside. though you have a chance to get into the crowd :)