>>But Rails is

I was about to mention this. I know of at least two (very) hot S13 YC companies that either built their web app in Rails or explicitly deal with Rails (not sure if One Month Rails is built in Rails or not, but it is pretty explicitly pro-Rails). Does Rails prevalence preclude Ruby from being a dying language? Depends on what you mean by dying. The dominance of Rails is probably something of a blessing and a curse for the broader Ruby world. I'm too new to it to have a strong position, but I will say that as a novice developer, I went with Ruby and Rails because there is a fantastic suite of tools for learning from scratch.

Rails is a curse. Because of it, Ruby (which is a fantastic language) has been reduced to a web language, when it's really much more than that.

Ruby was a little-known project before Rails came along. Without Rails, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

I never would have been exposed to Ruby if not for Rails (I'm a novice, self taught developer). While everyone talks about how amazing Scala and Haskell are (of which I have no doubt), I learned Ruby because Rails allowed me to build little projects (usually web apps) very easily. Now I have branched out into a bit of node.JS, some Python, and some Clojure (I like the idea of learning a Lisp), but Rails was a friendly entry point.

Well there's a broad range of applications that simply can't be built with Rails. And that's shame. It's a corollary to the other commenter saying that Rails no longer fits the new web programming paradigms.