If you live in the west coast, certainly. Anywhere else in the world absolutely not.
> Ruby emphasizes developer happiness at the expense of some things,
That's a strange statement. Plenty of developers enjoy writing PHP, or C++ or even Java. Ruby doesn't make developers more happy, by no serious metrics.
Ruby had its shot but wasted it because of the petulance, the arrogance, the immaturity and the toxicity of its community.
> None of them are an effective hammer for every nail you'll encounter.
Ruby (in fact Rails since that's really what it is all about) is clearly redundant in the era of light weight servers and thick clients.
You are being unduly pessimistic (or maybe petulant/arrogant/toxic).
Ruby is the language for the second most popular HTTP MVC framework (Rails) and the first most common popular tool (Chef).
My biggest grip with Ruby are mostly that the community seems more amateurish than average. SO Ruby questions are like Javascript questions in 2008. with a lot of misinformation and the assumption that you were using jQuery (or Rails for Ruby). I'm sure there are a lot of Ruby experts that know how to program well. They just don't seem as common as say, in the Python community.
"I always thought Smalltalk would beat Java. I just didn't know it would be called 'Ruby' when it did so." - Kent Beck
There's a decent demand for Ruby developers worldwide. I worked in New Zealand before getting paid relocation to Germany as a Ruby dev and I'm still getting daily "come to London" LinkedIn spam for Ruby work.
"Developer happiness" is how Matz describes minimising friction between the developer and the language. Ruby aims to provide abstractions with the lowest possible cognitive overhead. Contrast this with Rust which aims to provide abstractions with the lowest possible performance overhead. Everything is a trade-off.
Ruby's stagnation has nothing to do with the community. Improving Ruby performance is extremely difficult because of the sheer flexibility of the language. It doesn't help that until fairly recently no one got paid to work on Ruby. Now Heroku are paying several of the core team.
The IBM OMR project is working on bringing a companion JIT to standard Ruby. Oracle are working on a ground up re-implementation of Ruby using a new technology called Truffle + Graal for implementing languages on top of the JVM with performance which will be on par with Go.
If you live in the west coast, certainly. Anywhere else in the world absolutely not.
> Ruby emphasizes developer happiness at the expense of some things,
That's a strange statement. Plenty of developers enjoy writing PHP, or C++ or even Java. Ruby doesn't make developers more happy, by no serious metrics.
Ruby had its shot but wasted it because of the petulance, the arrogance, the immaturity and the toxicity of its community.
> None of them are an effective hammer for every nail you'll encounter.
Ruby (in fact Rails since that's really what it is all about) is clearly redundant in the era of light weight servers and thick clients.