> I would not be a Rubyist if it wasn't for Rails. Well, maybe I would have eventually gotten around to learning it. But I learned Rails before I learned Ruby..

> I would not be a Rubyist if it wasn't for Rails. Well, maybe I would have eventually gotten around to learning it. But I learned Rails before I learned Ruby... You're not the only one in that boat. Ruby is a great language in its own right — but with Perl & Python being so widely available, it really did need a killer app (Rails) to spur adoption. I learnt Ruby because I was interested in Rails — I don't think I would have ever bothered (beyond a little dabbling) otherwise. It's not so much that I don't like to check out new languages, but having a pragmatic reason to do so helps significantly.