Oh, absolutely. But I'd keep language hipsters away from important software (although any language built on a solid foundation like BEAM or the JVM is a much safer bet than one that isn't). :)
> I seem to be able to pick the winners of the next horse race in technology... Ruby
Wait, you consider Ruby a winning horse? I hear it's a fun language -- probably a great one -- but it's already beginning to fade after hardly having left a mark on anything but web apps (a very small portion of the software industry, and the least technological). If we coldly consider results I think it hardly qualifies as more than a relatively extended fad. It's not even nearly as popular as Delphi was in its heyday, let alone top-ten languages like Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, VB and JavaScript. In fact, I think that of all languages that could be considered Ruby competitors, Ruby has done the worst (it never threatened PHP's dominance in its field and was easily overtaken by Python -- which has been used in many more domains).
Fads are often self-fulfilling prophecies, often gaining brief popularity on sheer novelty alone; but important codebases last for decades. And don't mistake the tiny Silicon Valley software startup scene for a representative of the software industry. Most software developers in the world have never even heard of HN.
