I loved writing straight Ruby. It is by far my favorite scripting language. It makes me sad that Ruby on rails was the one big thing done in Ruby and that that gave it somewhat of a bad rap.
Were it not for Rails, most people wouldn't have heard of Ruby. It is unfortunate that Ruby doesn't get more general computing use, but Rails is really just the tip of the iceberg in a big project that uses Ruby. (You still get to do a lot of nice work that isn't Rails specific, at least if you structure your system well.)
