That may be true in the "Rails ecosystem", but Ruby has a really vibrant community of people writing tiny gems for everything. It rarely has one accepted library for one problem, usually, there are 2 or 3. Actually, as a Rubyist, I do feel the same issue when using Python: I don't know my way around the community, thus I never find the hidden gems or which libraries are hot (or not). I thinks its more a problem of perspective then reality.

Granted, no one can match Perl in that respect :).

Ruby gems provide enormous amount of functionality. You can do almost anything you want with Ruby, and even when there isn't a library to do exactly what you want, there are enough supporting libraries for you to quickly write the library you need.

I concur writing new gems is a good idea as CPAN is often the only reason I have to return to perl for some quick tasks. As CPAN is the grandfather of all package management systems and probably of (inet) shared libraries too it is perfectly clear why rubygems lacks the amount of available solutions to certain problem spaces. Doesn't mean we cannot get there some day :) So I'd say I. let's build more & sometimes better gems and II. use wrappers for C libs where money/time constraints are too significant to DIY (e.g. https://github.com/ffi/ffi/wiki/Basic-Usage ) Bottom line: try to share and contribute whenever possible. Love your language diversity :)

The number of available and useful gems makes Ruby my favourite for the kitchen sink. I recently had to build a web spider very quickly for a concept, and there was a gem that provided a multi-threaded spider. Obviously, Ruby wouldn't be my choice for an actual production spider for larger projects, but it let me get a prototype done very quickly :)