To be honest, I think the most important thing Rubyists could do to help 
Ruby grow and become more relevant would be to more whole-heartedly 
support alternative implementations like JRuby, IronRuby, and MacRuby 
that target new domains of developers on other platforms.

The truth is the C implementations of Ruby are only one part of our 
quest to conquer the world...there are a lot of developers out there on 
existing VMs and platforms that need to be brought into the fold. And 
they're not going to leave those platforms. The best way to bring them 
over is to embrace the Ruby implementations for those platforms, and do 
everything possible to make sure they're top-notch. The alternative is 
losing mindshare to languages like Groovy or Scala on the JVM or 
IronPython, F#, or C# on the CLR.

The recent migration by Twitter of key infrastructure to Scala is a 
perfect example of this.

But this also raises another question: Does the Ruby community want to 
be all-inclusive? More and more I see Ruby groups splintering into the 
"regulars" and the "elites", and sometimes the elite groups splinter 
even further. Many of the Ruby old guard want to keep Ruby an exclusive 
club, and I think that elitism hurts the community.

I believe it's important for Ruby to continue growing and to draw in as 
many Java, .NET, and other platform developers as possible. I believe 
it's important for the Ruby community to do more to help these 
alternative Ruby platforms be successful. But I don't know yet whether 
it's what the Ruby community wants.

- Charlie

Suresh Kk wrote:
> Will Ruby  find it  difficult to stay in the first 10 languages list
> on  Tiobe  Index  ?
> 
> According to one of my friends views :
> 
> The emergence of new languages like Clojure, Scala, Fan, indicate to
> this.   All these  new languages have concurrency support and are faster
> than Ruby. Python is improving constantly.  Its perfomance has always
> been
> faster than Ruby,  and it is very scalable, stable and widely used.
> Perl is coming back  with its new avatar "Perl 6" armed with types.
> PHP may keep its present postion.  Groovy slowly ascends the ladder.
> 
> Inspite of all his comments, My favourite language is Ruby.
> I have been using ruby for the last 3 years.  It has vastly helped me
> to make my daily office work  easier.  Hopefully 1.9.1 compatible issue
> with existing libraries will be solved within months.
> 
> Exprert Rubyists,  Please share your views on this matter to enliven
> my kind of average rubyists.
> 
> Long Live Ruby !!