It looks like Tim Bray and I currently happen to be in very similar places with respect to Ruby. I too am just starting to use Ruby in real production applications, and like Tim, I too have been ridiculously productive with it over the past few weeks.
While I really like Ruby itself, I have to say that I really don't like the poor state of Ruby documentation. Tim doesn't seem to mind it too much, but I think it's inexcusable. Documentation for both Perl and Python is so much better. With Ruby, most of the time when you try to find documentation all you get is the code, which, while certainly useful, doesn't convey assumptions, limitations, or the big picture. Without the Pickaxe and without the ability to use irb to poke around, I'd be lost.
For my work, I like the fact that the soap4r package is readily available for Ruby. but I have to admit that the design of soap4r strikes me as odd. Given my middleware background, I'm used to generating C/C++/Java stubs/skeletons/proxies from description languages and compiling them into applications. But Ruby is dynamic, so I don't understand the need for a tool like wsdl2ruby for generating Ruby code from WSDL. So I just avoid that part. Instead, I use some of the underlying soap4r classes to do everything I need dynamically.
All in all, I agree with Tim. Ruby is not only cool, but more importantly, it's extremely useful, even in the enterprise. It can easily raise your productivity. If the first item in this list describes you, and you don't know a language like Ruby or Python, I suggest you get with the program.
