I think Ruby's success is an example that the era of "the language of the platform" is gone: there was no OS or app to use Ruby as its scripting language, but t

I think Ruby's success is an example that the era of "the language of the platform" is gone: there was no OS or app to use Ruby as its scripting language, but there was more than one language to choose from for building a web framework, and DHH happened to choose Ruby. Same with Python in the scientific computing field. Or (unfortunately) PHP in the web world. We have multi-languages VMs (JVM ostensively, but CLR too...) and multi-platform languages galore. The era of the platform language is gone, and it's a free for all language war, where features and libraries are all it matters, and I'm sure Lisps will win more ground in one form or another, though something like Scala will probably "rule the world" :)