[hunter23]

Yes, one of the biggest drawbacks in the Ruby world is the lack of strong libraries outside of web dev. Python has scrapy, numpy, pandas, nltk, beautifulsoup, matplotlib, etc. Basically if you want to do almost anything (except high performance real time stuff) you can do it in python. it is an excellent general purpose language.

In ruby, the world isn't so great. When I was in the ruby world, I would always hit roadblocks on my side projects. There were so many times where I wanted to do something not web dev related and I couldn't find a popular and well supported ruby package. For example, I wanted to do text analysis of some sites I scraped and python's nltk was perfect (but there wasn't a perfect ruby library).

The ruby world needs to expand beyond web dev if it wants to grow.

[agonux]

There is only a shortage of scientific libraries, you can do others tasks than web development with Ruby. Ruby is great for sysadmin tasks too for exemple. Many configuration tools was developped in Ruby.

[ksec]

>The ruby world needs to expand beyond web dev if it wants to grow.

I mentioned this in my other post. Ruby is the only language on the top list that doesn't have a major cooperate backing. Basically Ruby community are really lack of resources.