We really need to start surveying real statistics on what programming languages community members know. I've seen this assertion waved around again and again, but don't see where it originates from, besides the very unreliable fact that we just don't talk much about ruby around here.
I for one know ruby. And frankly ruby isn't like our other issue. Ruby is nothing like how hard OCaml would be to learn and maintain.
We really should beat down this notion that anything written in ruby should be avoided. I don't like how we reject the possibility of using well written existing open-source projects simply because they were written using ruby. It's almost as bad as NIH.
How many languages can we reasonably support? We're currently using PHP, Python, Java, OCaml and Javascript (and probably more). Should we also throw Ruby in here as well? What level of support are the Selenium tests really going to get if they require developers to use Ruby?
We've already gone down the Ruby road once. I think a lot of the people involved with that would say it was a bad call, especially ops.
- Ryan