I did a bunch of research on Ruby + Ruby On Rails, had heard some good things (hype) about it and thought it was worth a look.
After many hours on the web reading various forums etc. I reached the following conclusions.
* RoR is championed by a bunch of very obnoxious and combative supporters, for whom this is usually their first or second computer language. As such they are very gaga about how great it is and are also totally ignorant (I'm being polite here) about what it takes to produce a real world app.
* Ruby + RoR have serious problems with deployment especially in a shared hosting environment
* RoR has serious performance issues and is a huge memory hog
* it also has a reputation for poor stability -- server crashes frequently, probably due to memory leaks.
* There is nothing particularly special about RoR; php has frameworks available that can do the same thing. Ruby stole a couple of ideas from Small-Talk 80 (as in 1980) and seem to think that they have reinvented sliced toast.
* And despite all the noise -- it is a very vocal group -- they have actually achieved very little market penetration, very few actual real world users.
* The commercials are cute, at least some of their promoters have a good sense of humor.
Conclusion: IMHO* Ruby is an Over hyped Fad of little substance. And it has an abysmal track record of high profile flops by people who tried to use it for real-world apps (as opposed to contrived demos). There is plenty of stuff that sounds great in theory, but the real world often does not cooperate.
And when their community isn't busy stomping all over everybody else, they are busy fighting amongst themselves.
Bottom line: If you aren't a masochist I would suggest avoiding them. Besides, Blumentals ought to be putting their time into other priorities such as fixing the unusable PHP Debugger. And much better support/integration of JavaScript. If you go for depth not breadth, you will have a much better product with a real edge over the competition. Consider the numbers, everybody uses JavaScript, hardly anybody uses Ruby. Give us fantastic JavaScript capability to equal your fantastic PHP Editor and you are much more likely to increase sales. And please fix that debugger, you've had plenty of people telling you how broken it is. Eclipse is not fun to use but at least their debugger works, in fact it's the best one I've seen (but still has room for improvement).
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* My basis for this not so humble opinion, besides the many hours that I spent on the web reading about Ruby+RoR, is that I have been programming since the 80s and in more different computer languages then I can count. Highfaluting theories don't impress me, real-world performance does, and so far Ruby has failed to deliver.