But I'm not arguing Ruby is well past it's peak - that is (sad, to me) fact because I happen to think it's a gorgeous language but it is what it is. I guess I'll have to get used to Python/Node or maybe switch to low level which is an old and perhaps unrealistic old dream of mine.
Were you around for the first (pre-2000) dotcom boom? From where I was sitting (freelancing in London) it sometimes seemed that all of the first wave of dotcom companies were writing their apps in Perl.
In fact, I've often thought that a lot of Perl's current bad reputation stems from this generation's CTOs and dev managers being people who suffered writing those Perl web apps at a time when no-one knew how any of this stuff was supposed to work and careful design went out the window in the rush to get things to market before the bubble burst.
(Having said that, I suspect that the Ruby community's love of "first, install a Ruby version manager" does it no favors when it comes to adoption for these sorts of small projects, although the same is arguably true of Python.)