Although in the media, on dzone, counting new books etc Ruby is getting a lot of attention. That said, its use has exponentiated from a negligible level to minute one compared to Python. The features of Rails can be found in Pylon, Django among others. The largest singular MMOG (Eve Online) is written in Stackless Python. Google started out in Python and still uses it in many projects. It runs on Java and .Net, as well as natively. And Python isn't sitting still either, with version 3 due out by early next year.

The only mystery with Ruby is 'why all the hype?', and as usual with crowd/hype systems, the reasons aren't solid, undebatable or even all that good. Ruby programmers make out that its so different to Perl and Python, but really it sits somewhere between the two. That's nice but nothing to write home about.