I discovered this when I looked at using Scala for a particular project. The ratio of good-to-unfinished/poor libraries was much lower than for Ruby. It was also evident that code style/programming conventions had not solidified yet; it looked like the early stages of Ruby, where people weren't yet quite sure how to write "rubyesque" code. (Take a look at Ruby's standard library; it's for the most part very much out of date with "modern style" Ruby.)
I see the same kind of uncertainty with some Haskell projects, like the Text.Regex package, which I tried to figure out how to use, and failed, even with repeated google searches to find examples. The author seems to attempt at a certain ambitious programming style based on typeclasses, but since its usage is undocumented (or was, at the time I tried it ~6 months ago) you have to be a level 15 Haskell wizard to untangle its API. Similar Ruby experiments exist, and are eventually deprecated because of "too much magic".
Sure, Ruby developers create way too many projects that are never finished (or equally bad, are abandoned). But the stable of good-or-great libraries is actually very solid. Probably more so for web development than other things (Ruby doesn't have anything like Python's NumPy, for example); if you start a web project with Ruby you can get absurdly productive by just harnessing a few existing gems.
I discovered this when I looked at using Scala for a particular project. The ratio of good-to-unfinished/poor libraries was much lower than for Ruby. It was also evident that code style/programming conventions had not solidified yet; it looked like the early stages of Ruby, where people weren't yet quite sure how to write "rubyesque" code. (Take a look at Ruby's standard library; it's for the most part very much out of date with "modern style" Ruby.)
I see the same kind of uncertainty with some Haskell projects, like the Text.Regex package, which I tried to figure out how to use, and failed, even with repeated google searches to find examples. The author seems to attempt at a certain ambitious programming style based on typeclasses, but since its usage is undocumented (or was, at the time I tried it ~6 months ago) you have to be a level 15 Haskell wizard to untangle its API. Similar Ruby experiments exist, and are eventually deprecated because of "too much magic".
Sure, Ruby developers create way too many projects that are never finished (or equally bad, are abandoned). But the stable of good-or-great libraries is actually very solid. Probably more so for web development than other things (Ruby doesn't have anything like Python's NumPy, for example); if you start a web project with Ruby you can get absurdly productive by just harnessing a few existing gems.