"Use of the Ruby programming language is expected to quadruple over the next five years." - No, I don't get that Ruby hype. Like the irksome Java hype fifteen years ago, when everything before Java was called obsolete and nothing less than the whole world be revolutionized through Java, Ruby and its descendant Ruby on Rails claim to be the next cool kids on the block.

What's happening here? To quote Sun Microsystems engineer Chris Nutter: "Ruby is the classic pattern of how technology gets adopted - it's not one big company telling you what technology to use, the people using Ruby now are hackers - it's kind of an organic system." But this is true for many programming languages and there are many examples for grass-roots developments of the past, like Perl or Python, as well as there are accepted and usable languages like C# and Java, each provided by big companies. While these are major successes, many languages were not, who still knows COMAL (mainly a University project)? How (commercially) successful and widespread is ADA? Precisely.

So if a programming language becomes well-liked depends on factors like productivity and intuitive usability. This explains why Perl, a language with a quite steep learning curve, is that widespread and still fancied after 20 years. Powerful IDEs can support a language greatly: with completing keywords by pressing the tab key, an easily accessible help system, an easy-to-use debugger help you to get along even if you are uncommon with syntax and grammar of a programming language. That's only one reason why Delphi, Visual Studio and Eclipse and their accompanying languages (Object Pascal, C/C++, the .Net languages, and Java) are still the measure of choice for many. System administrators indeed like to get a lot of results for less code, but they also want to dig deeper than the common programmer who is used to his framework. This explains why command line tools (grep, awk, various shells) and powerful scripting languages (Perl, TCL, REXX, even VBScript) are fancied by admins.

But Ruby? Sorry folks, but if things get too simple and the development process becomes too 'agile', I draw my conclusions. Systems like Ruby, furthermore things like Ruby on Rails, are an employer's dream, as they promise to lower the learning curve and to get more productivity with less developers. So this way Ruby becomes the right toy for the 21st century in order to lower software development costs even more. Because there will be no need to employ costly application developers but just a few people with enough skills to learn a framework without having to know much about data types, algorithms, or anything else related to computer science. Thanks, but no thanks. (Source)