Please don't take what Cringely has to say as an accurate barometer of the Ruby community. While I'll freely admit that Rails (and web applications in general)

Please don't take what Cringely has to say as an accurate barometer of the Ruby community. While I'll freely admit that Rails (and web applications in general) is an enormous part of what people are using Ruby for, it's used for many non-web things as well (although perhaps not to the same degree as Python) Ever seen one of those satellite maps of the US at night that NOAA produces? That was made with Ruby. Just another off-the-cuff example: JRuby powers the HBase console.