“Python fits your brain”. Nope, no echos there.

Ruby brought in the revolution and sooner or later there will be another language that will bring in Ruby’s revolutionary concepts and improve it more.

To me, Ruby on Rails came and went. It didn’t take over the world, the number of job postings on boards is still vanishingly small and will probably keep decreasing until it bottoms out.

RoR had a good influence on the software world, but it’s now stuck in a niche with a minuscule mind share and it will soon be a footnote in the software industry.

Ruby itself will probably outlive RoR in popularity, though.

Ruby is the language that proved average programmers can get things down without Java’s straitjacket (much as Java proved you don’t need C’s flexibility to be fast enough).

However after a few years of Ruby the limitations of test-driven development (or TATFT if you will) are becoming more and more apparent to me. Specifically that showing that something is correct in a series of specific test cases is nice, but it’s no replacement for proving the correctness of things ala functional programming.

These days I’m really most excited about Haskell simply because it seems to be the only language that absolutely enforces purity, which is a very useful exercise for moving the state of the art forward, even if we never embrace functional program completely.

For me Ruby has been a gateway to functional programming (Ruby -> Lisp -> OCaml -> Erlang -> Haskell -> Scala). The challenge of multi-core means we’re headed to a Functional Renaissance.
Unless it’s through JRuby or perhaps Rubinius, I doubt we’ll see Ruby play much in the multi-core, parallel and distributed spaces.

Oh, and don’t ever get too attached to one language. They come and go like fashions. Stay nimble.