Rails is frankly a double-edged sword, though. While it helped propel Ruby, and is a great framework, it also seems to have permanently marked the language with a notion that its simply a vehicle for Rails.

Ruby is probably one of the more coherently designed general purpose programming languages (in my opinion, much more so than Python, a language that dominates the industry) but doesn't seem to get much use in that domain, which is a shame.

As a rails developer I really believe if Ruby had at least one more 'Killer App' it would lead to a much healthier overall community.