rails may be the most visible ruby project out there (and indeed the "killer app" that got a lot of people and businesses into ruby), but it is by no means crit

rails may be the most visible ruby project out there (and indeed the "killer app" that got a lot of people and businesses into ruby), but it is by no means critical or even necessary for ruby's continuing success. check out puppet's userbase, for instance - there are some huge companies using it to manage their deployments. jruby could well become one of the go-to jvm automation solutions down the road; it's certainly doing everything right to get there. but more than any of that, ruby is simply the most productive language i've encountered for performing quick one-off tasks and exploring algorithms. it has all the strengths of perl (another language that plays very well in this particular niche), and adds very natural support for both object-oriented and functional approaches. i've used lots of languages (everything from basic to haskell) and ruby is almost unique in that i have never felt like i was fighting with the language to put my ideas into code. i think of the way i'd like to say something, and sure enough, ruby supports it and more often than not makes it easy and natural.