Yeah, three companies worth an estimated $300B can keep any language alive. It’s fascinating to track the second wind of out-of-fashion languages, held aloft by a few mature companies that depend on it.
I'd argue even without them Ruby would be alive in the sense that the core language would get frequent updates.
Even Perl is still alive https://github.com/Perl/perl5, even in a healthier state than I would have thought.
Oh wow, Perl is still getting monthly updates - I knew it was on the decline but I thought the whole Perl 6/Perl 7/Perl 11 fragmentation had left things in a worse state.
I’ve heard of Raku (Perl 6), but didn’t realize there was a Perl 7 or Perl 11. Pretty interesting problem. In Java land you get Java 8, current Java, Groovy, Kotlin, etc. So Perl is in good company in this regard.
Perl 11 was a thought experiment. It never actually became anything beyond a website expressing that notion. It got no traction from anybody apart of the originators. And of that I'm not really sure either.
Facebook and PHP are kind an interesting twist on that. Facebook spent a lot of time and money on Hack/HHVM, then the PHP core devs responded with a new version of PHP that is, in many cases, faster. Though Hack/HHVM is still better for async work.