[tedunangst]

The distinction is rather academic with ruby and rails. 90% of the answers to "how do I do this in ruby" on forums are actually "how to do this with rails" answers, but they never mention that little detail, because who'd ever write a ruby program without rails, right? Trying to find straight ruby answers is annoying as hell.

[chimeracoder]

I've had frustrations with certain "ruby" libraries requiring methods like "blank?" (IIRC) that are provided only via Rails, not Ruby. It made developing on a machine that Ruby but not rails rather annoying.

[Turing_Machine]

"The distinction is rather academic with ruby and rails."

No, it isn't.

"90% of the answers to "how do I do this in ruby" on forums are actually "how to do this with rails" answers"

You're looking in the wrong places.

"who'd ever write a ruby program without rails, right?"

People who are writing shell scripts? People who are using Sinatra? People who are writing desktop Ruby programs?