Our team uses Perl for almost 100% of our projects, as we have for the
past 10 year or so. At that point we broke from the C/C++ herd and
never looked back. Our productivity has been the best in the
corporation since, and we hear nothing but complaints and bad-mouthing
from the Java/C++ cadre since their design and  implementations are
typically 5-10X what ours are..

Anyhow- as the team director, I'm always *looking ahead*. Although Perl
is still serving us well, I'm thinking for the benefit of our
developers ( to get more languages in their personal toolkit ) as well
as making productivity improvements through OO design and the ruby
environment, I'm starting to talk up and promote Ruby as the NEXT
language.

This REALLY set off a firestorm from the Java folks, They are already
they are trying to undermine us with comments like:

o you'll never find any developers to support it, there are almost none
in the USA

o you won't like anything that comes out of Japan (this comment from a
country that was conquered by Japan and still harbors a lot of
resentment, so I sort of discounted that comment! )

o its not gaining popularity and will probably die out

o might as well just use Java

... and so on..

Anyhow, if you all can provide me with websites on Ruby stats vis-a-vis
other languages, trends, successes, etc., I'd like to go into this
battle armed!  The break from the herd 10 years ago was very
productive, and my impression is that Ruby would have similar results.