Ruby and Thought Leadership

Don Box may be a few weeks late to James Gosling's comments about Ruby, but he does pay Ruby a nice compliment. He says:

"Ruby has the language thought leadership position..."

In the comments Don implies that Ruby will overtake Java once Ruby gets a first class IDE. I think the Java community can rest easy, I don't see that happening for a long time, if ever.

Oh, and one more thing, I agree with Don that .NET is slightly less vulnerable to Ruby than Java, but by only a fraction of a percent. Why? Because Ruby does have thought leadership. I gave a presentation on Ruby and Rails to some developer evangelists at Microsoft a few weeks ago and I tried to make that point crystal clear. Perhaps that first class IDE support should come from Visual Studio 2007?