[memracom]

Ruby is a dangerous language. It is so dominated by Rails that you will likely end up warping your mind into thinking that the ActiveRecord pattern is the best way to manage data and that every problem can be solved with a web app.

I would suggest learning Python instead because there is more diversity in the Python community (or should I say communities?). Compare the communities around http://ipython.org/notebook.html and http://www.gevent.org/ and http://plone.org/documentation/#developer_doc

[dragonwriter]

> Ruby is a dangerous language. It is so dominated by Rails that you will likely end up warping your mind into thinking that the ActiveRecord pattern is the best way to manage data and that every problem can be solved with a web app.

That hasn't been my experience, and I don't think its generally true as long as you don't learn Ruby through Rails.