Well that's false because I used it, and there was quite a vibrant community around it already.

Yes ? Point me to a popular open source project that is written in Ruby that is not web based ? Even today where we just passed peak ruby.

And I mean "yum" popular. Blender popular. QGIS popular. Not "that script that sort my ssh connection is in Ruby" popular.

> Point me to a popular open source project that is written in Ruby that is not web based ?

How is that relevant? The question was what justified Ruby at the time.

If "Ruby on Rails" was the only justification, why did people use it for the 10 years prior to that? Were they not justified in using it? That's just nonsense.

homebrew, fastlane, fluentd, vagrant, gitlab, cocoapods...

chef and puppet are very popular