Anyway, I think your dismissal of the newer languages is very premature. PHP took a long, long time to get where it is. 10 years ago you would have been saying "Perl has WON!!!"
Anyway, I think your dismissal of the newer languages is very premature. PHP took a long, long time to get where it is. 10 years ago you would have been saying "Perl has WON!!!"
But now, there's an astonishing amount of development and innovation surrounding Ruby. Look at MacRuby, for example - if that isn't a vote of confidence I don't know what is. In my opinion, the language is only just beginning to properly hit its stride.
Who knows what will happen. Ruby might fail to gain critical mass, of course. But my point was that the OP's assertion that Ruby had tried and failed to make its mark is very premature. The Rails hype might have died down but from my perspective Ruby has more momentum than ever.
There's also Rubinius. I think an exhaustive test suite for the language spec is a good thing.