Since no-one has brought up ruby's "blank-space is meaningful" cousin
(Thou Shalt Not Name The Name!), let me just say that their libraries
are developed basically the same way as ours. There is no coalition of
central programmers with a roadmap and quotas toiling away at making
all the library extensions. Many of the libs are from small groups (or
single developers); for example ElementTree and the sqlite binding.
Both were created by individuals (and tweaked by small groups), and
both are now in the standard library, because they proved their worth.
Ruby has *more* of an organizing platform around rubyforge, if
anything. But ruby doesn't have as large a core of users. And that's
basically all it boils down to.

However, at the same time, sometimes people just aren't willing (or
don't know how?) to look for/use things. For example, people
complaining here about lack of GUI support. Well, I've not looked at
the native win32 bindings, nor very much at the wx or qt bindings (and
Tk, yeah I agree with everyone there...until Tile is distributed with
Tk, it makes me say "yuk"). But I have looked at ruby-gtk extensively,
and have programmed the *SAME APP* -- with semi-advanced stuff like
draggable, editable tree cells, draggable tabs and so forth -- in both
ruby and That Other Language, using their respective bindings to GTK
(to see how similar they were). The libs and docs for both were very
much on par with each other (which is to say excellent).

Ok, that's about all of my rambling. But I do want to make one last
point. Many other languages are as "poorly" documented (in their core
and popular libs), and are used every day for production or at least
prototyping. Notably, the functional languages: LISP (and it's read-
headed-stepchildren, Scheme, Guile, &c), SML and OCaml (not forgetting
their puritanical cousin Haskell). LISP has been around since the
50's(!) (on paper, anyway), and the others since the late 80's-early
90's. And they are not "fading" from sight any time soon. If anything,
they are becoming more popular than ever. So just because you can't
see something, doesn't mean it's not there, or is any less powerful; a
rip-current under what looks like calm seas can sink a freighter! And
a little iceberg can...well..."sink the titanic."

Whew! Now I'm done ranting. :)

Regards,
Jordan