You're comparing a language to a framework. Rails is but one of rubys web-frameworks. There's sinatra and built on top of that padrino. There's camping, static

You're comparing a language to a framework. Rails is but one of rubys web-frameworks. There's sinatra and built on top of that padrino. There's camping, static page generators like octopress and that's just the web-world. Even rails is not a monolithic bloc: You can use activerecord or activesupport as libraries and rails itself uses a ton of libs itself. The ruby community values small libraries that can be plugged together to a bigger whole - and rails is basically a very opinionated collection of libraries with some glue code (and magic) to form a cohesive API. It's good for some kind of projects and it's certainly the oldest and biggest ruby framework, but it's by far not the only one.