Overall, I think that this is a pretty fair assessment.

This struck me: “We’re not all mindless and we’re not all drones. The unspoken sentiment when talking about the future growth of Ruby was “things are ok now because we’re all smart and dedicated craftsmen, unlike people who are using Java but will eventually invade beautiful ruby-land and make it ‘enterprisey’”.”

I can see how you might pick up this sentiment. But as with anything, it’s so easy to paint the “outside” of your community with a broad brush. I think the truth is that there are many, many craftsmen in the Java world, who are unaware or unable to become part of the Ruby community. But these are the very people who will eventually join.

As for the seeming immaturity of the approach to things like threading, I take this as yet another example of how open source software can sometimes lag the technical output of commercially-backed software (obviously, sometimes, it’s the reverse. I’m taken back to MySQL, which always seemed like a joke to me back in the late ’90s, when I was intimate with the Informix RDBMS. Now MySQL is pretty serious, and will continue to grow as a major player in that market (especially now that they’ve got Sun behind them). Watch the pace of innovation on JRuby, given that the two lead developers are now employed by Sun to work solely on it.