Ruby is definitely big in Seattle -- I would say bigger than Python or PHP, but that could just be my circles. In the language popularity lists I've seen, it's

Ruby is definitely big in Seattle -- I would say bigger than Python or PHP, but that could just be my circles. In the language popularity lists I've seen, it's typically in the #11-15 slot, which is not too shabby. The "LAMP platform" is defined by the set of people using PHP/Perl, so I wouldn't call it "pushed" by that. It's not the native platform of Linux, Apache, MySQL, or the web, and there wasn't exactly any big company pushing it (Facebook famously uses it but it had already cemented its popularity by then).