Ruby's "footprint" in the dev world has so far been mostly by way of hype.

I admit my statement is purely opinion.

I live and work in San Francisco these days. I go to Berkeley and other local schools to do recruiting, several times each year. We hire from other places like Harvard and Stanford.

Those kids hardly even know what Perl is.

Ask them about Rails, and they have all at least played around with it, and many have github accounts with some silly Rails app that they made for fun.

I don't think hype is a bad thing, when it at least gives you a starting point to work from.