As one of the authors of Phusion Passenger, I've found Ruby to be an excellent tool for writing Unix server apps/tools. Maybe not high performance servers (the

As one of the authors of Phusion Passenger, I've found Ruby to be an excellent tool for writing Unix server apps/tools. Maybe not high performance servers (the Phusion Passenger core is in C++) but it's perfect for servers in the low to mid performance range that you want to write quickly. Ruby is very, very, very good for writing things like sysadmin tools and installers. The Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition installers are written in Ruby and it was a much more enjoyable experience than writing such things in bash. As for multiple libraries, each language has multiple libraries with the same purpose, Python is no exception. If you want to know which one is best for your purpose you can just ask on StackOverflow these days. DRb works. It's not broken. There are just two issues: * Documentation can be better. It seems people haven't worked on its documentation for a while now. * Few people actually need DRb. "ghetto" here doesn't imply that the stdlib is a horrible broken mess, it implies that some things are better split outside the core Ruby distribution.