To expand on this, and on the OP, one thing that you need after the force is momentum. I strongly feel that if Ruby was just Rails, it would have petered out b

To expand on this, and on the OP, one thing that you need after the force is momentum. I strongly feel that if Ruby was just Rails, it would have petered out by now (maybe people might have even gone back to Perl and CPAN). I think that GitHub may well be the driving force behind Ruby at this point. GitHub gems are pretty decent, but like the OP points out, Haskell packages aren't.