Hey Ed,

 > VS is still "good enough" for lots of SCM users, and between CVS and SVN, 
there's not much need for more innovation as far as I'm concerned. One of the 
big principles of "agile" and "pragmatic" development is YAGNI -- You Ain't 
Gonna Need It!

I think there's heaps of room for new ideas and innovation in the SCM area. 
There are a fair number of tools floating around with various unique features 
and approaches. If the area was dead I think we'd just see one or two tools gain 
and hold dominance.

 > I don't really think of Ruby as innovative -- one of the charming things 
about Ruby is that it is a collection of good ideas that have stood the test of 
time. Regular expressions, classes, objects and methods, dynamic "typing", 
flexible syntax, "it's always run time", continuations, arbitrary precision 
integer arithmetic, flexible arrays and hashes --- these are all wheels that 
Ruby didn't re-invent!

The appeal of Ruby to me is its incredible flexibility and the ability to 
develop small bodies of code in it *really* fast. There's no fighting the 
compiler or dealing with odd legacy requirements. You aren't pressured into a 
particular paradigm, and you can be sloppy if you want. It bundles a whole bunch 
of good ideas together and makes it available for you in a single language. The 
focus seems to be on flexibility and powerful expression, which leads to elegant 
solutions not always possible in other languages. You can experiment and 
prototype incredibly quickly. It also scales well provided that you don't go too 
far into the tens of thousands of lines of code.

I'd still go for a C++-like language for larger projects, because when I'm 
working on them I want the compiler to be absolutely pedantic and complain about 
every single thing it can, and I want complete control over how it works. But 
for many other things, Ruby is outstanding.

Garth