[Jgrubb]

I promise that puppet and chef are not how the majority of people first hear of Ruby.

[Argorak]

That really depends on your field of work. For web developers, maybe not, for admins: yes.

Also, they might not be the thing people hear about first, but they are still heavily driving actual adoption.

(FWIW: I'm chair member of the largest european Ruby non-profit, I speak to a lot of newcomers ;))

[kyllo]

That's changing. I work at a Fortune 500 company that's strictly a Java shop and will probably never use Rails. Hardly anyone there has even heard of it. But we are using Chef to configure Red Hat VMs and deploy app builds.