smltalk

Use the right tool for what you're doing. Ruby (or PHP) is great for rapid prototyping. But you won't want to use it if you need distributed processing. Also I feel more productive when I learning when I'm doing. Sure gems gets you more features, but how much have you really learned vs building it yourself?

If you're good, you'll get a job. I agree about SV job market. I'm getting pinged by recruiters everyday, mostly for Hadoop and Java work.

Interesting. How does this compare with SOLR and it's built-in sharding mechanisms?