>The appearance of risk is more important to most businesses than actual risk. Ruby isn't dominant, therefore it is perceived as risky ...
That's not quite right. Anecdotally, I've seen or read about big corps using hot JS front-end frameworks like Angular and Backbone, server frameworks and databases like Node.js, MongoDB and Redis, and programming languages like Python, Erlang and Scala in production. Even if you look at the big tech corps (such as Yahoo, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon), internally there isn't a whole lot of Ruby either. The big poster-child for Ruby, Twitter, is now most known for migrating away from Ruby than for actually using it.
I'm not a Ruby guy, but it doesn't seem like cliche corporate conservatism is what's holding Ruby back. It looks like it's Ruby, and specifically the Ruby platform. Maybe pretty Ruby language semantics aren't enough to make up for Ruby platform downsides. Maybe there just isn't a good reason to use Ruby.
>Java's complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project
The choice of Java would not threaten the survival of any small project. Though Java is (still) not a very pretty language, the tooling around it has gotten enormously better from where we were in, say, 2003. Current frameworks like JEE, Spring and Play are actually pretty great to work with.
Furthermore, I think Python (actually Jython) is starting to become for prevalent in the enterprise space. I've seen a few different enterprise software suites from companies like IBM and HP that support writing extensions in Jython. I know that the JVM implementation of Ruby is JRuby, but is anyone using that in production? Jython seems relatively more stable/mature, but I really don't know much about JRuby.
The only time I've ever used Jython is for administrating Websphere. And nothing says bloated overpriced overcomplicated time-wasting enterprise nightmare like Websphere.
Seriously, businesses will spend the equivalent of ten programmers' salaries on Websphere licenses, but they'd never consider hiring ten programmers. It's the poster child of corporate timidity in risk aversion drag.
Constant Contact uses Rails on jruby pretty extensively, because of improved performance and JVM integration. There was also a talk at Boston's Wicked Good Ruby conference of a case study of a large Struts 2 app getting extended in Rails on JRuby. (I asked about Grails as an alternative; not only was Groovy more painful than Ruby to work in, but Grails itself, in the speaker's experience, was more difficult to integrate into an existing application stack. Which is something the Grails folks might want to look into, if it's correct...)
From memory on the torquebox (application server for jruby based on jboss) or the jruby mailing list there was one guy who worked for a large gaming studio (I think it was one of sony's gaming divisions) who use jruby and torquebox for the network backend[1] of their AAA games.
[1] Gamer / game analytics, logins etc. Basically APIs that their games call over the network for the more "social / analytics" stuff.
Personally I have used jruby in the past for implementations of services where we needed to use java libraries.
I know of a couple of installations that use jruby in production. It's often coupled with some sort of java service in the backend, so sure, it's used in production.
It's also stable, even though it tends to lag a little behind cruby in some features. The 2.0.0 feature set is not yet implemented fully.
I'm using JRuby in the code I'm developing for my startup, in order to access Java libs I need. The biggest issue has been that it doesn't support Ruby 2.0 yet, which is merely aesthetic at this point for me. JRuby hasn't given me any grief since I got it going.
It seems that Ruby never won over Python in big tech companies. Probably it has something to do with Python being widespread in science (as far as I understand, tech companies are dominated by graduates from the best colleges) - if you're a graduate, you already know a scripting language, why learn another one?
That's not quite right. Anecdotally, I've seen or read about big corps using hot JS front-end frameworks like Angular and Backbone, server frameworks and databases like Node.js, MongoDB and Redis, and programming languages like Python, Erlang and Scala in production. Even if you look at the big tech corps (such as Yahoo, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon), internally there isn't a whole lot of Ruby either. The big poster-child for Ruby, Twitter, is now most known for migrating away from Ruby than for actually using it.
I'm not a Ruby guy, but it doesn't seem like cliche corporate conservatism is what's holding Ruby back. It looks like it's Ruby, and specifically the Ruby platform. Maybe pretty Ruby language semantics aren't enough to make up for Ruby platform downsides. Maybe there just isn't a good reason to use Ruby.
>Java's complexity might actually threaten the survival of a small project
The choice of Java would not threaten the survival of any small project. Though Java is (still) not a very pretty language, the tooling around it has gotten enormously better from where we were in, say, 2003. Current frameworks like JEE, Spring and Play are actually pretty great to work with.