The value proposition of the Ruby community has more to do with their mindshare than their technical merit.
Compare and contrast Scientology with Psychiatry. Both communities make similar value propositions: improve mental health.
Scientology is optimized to gain and keep converts and to spread like a viral meme.
Psychiatry is optimized to achieve good treatment outcomes.
Scientology makes more money despite being a less effective form of therapy.
Virality itself is adaptive, so the Ruby community thrives and survives despite being a mediocre technology. Everything about ruby is optimized for gaining converts, attention and cohesion. Hard technical merit is less important in this case than community cohesion, growth, and publicity. Flamewars bring the ruby community publicity and this leads to growth which leads to the survival and replication of ruby.
Erlang and C++ survive on hard technical merits. They take a different evolutionary strategy that requires less propaganda / groupthink.
Just look at the life cycle of communities as if they were a species and it all makes sense.
Scientology makes more money [than the field of psychiatry].
This seems really questionable to me. If we assume 13 psychiatrists per 100K people in 2005 ( http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=523453 ), and just count Europe and the US, that's ~80K psychiatrists, and if they average 120K USD per year, that's nearly 10 billion USD. Scientology had a worldwide income of less than 400 million in 1993 ( http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jD-Xo-q... ), so it would have had to grow by 20 times to rival psychiatry circa 2005.
I think psychiatry (leaving aside everything but actual practicing psychiatrists) probably dwarfs Scientology in total income.
I don't know about the Erlang trolls, but the C++ trolls are out writing shitty internal corporate apps for Windows, leaving no source and forcing a company to use the buggy app in perpetuity.
I've been trolled by people in lots of different "communities." PHP, Postgres, Java, Perl and Lua just to name a few. IMHO if a software community doesn't have jerks and trolls, it's because nobody is using the software. Ruby has its share but I don't find it any worse than the others.
Compare and contrast Scientology with Psychiatry. Both communities make similar value propositions: improve mental health.
Scientology is optimized to gain and keep converts and to spread like a viral meme.
Psychiatry is optimized to achieve good treatment outcomes.
Scientology makes more money despite being a less effective form of therapy.
Virality itself is adaptive, so the Ruby community thrives and survives despite being a mediocre technology. Everything about ruby is optimized for gaining converts, attention and cohesion. Hard technical merit is less important in this case than community cohesion, growth, and publicity. Flamewars bring the ruby community publicity and this leads to growth which leads to the survival and replication of ruby.
Erlang and C++ survive on hard technical merits. They take a different evolutionary strategy that requires less propaganda / groupthink.
Just look at the life cycle of communities as if they were a species and it all makes sense.