> It has now become a friendly, familliar, and reliable tool instead of the 
> rough, cutting edge one it used to be.

I am not sure to what you refer but in my experience the ruby community 
was rather friendly even ~4 years ago.

The only difference I seem to have noticed is that there are now a lot 
more people using ruby compared to ~4 years ago, and I also mean non-RoR 
using ruby guys.
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