I understand job security and demand is important.
But for me the most important has always been to enjoy myself as much as possible. That's also how I can do my best every day.
If that means having a 10% lower salary or half the number of job postings I'm fine with it.
If I really needed to find a non Ruby job I'm sure I still could, there's enough demand in general.
This is similar to my take, only I never ever want to work with Ruby, since it just rubs me the wrong way. This is a throwaway comment unless you care about the following question.
What is the the fundamental difference between Ruby and Lisp enthusiasts? The easy answer is OOP vs FP, but as soon as you dive into the details the distinction becomes more difficult. A thread [vs] between Alan Kay and Rich Hickey is perhaps informative, but not illustrative.
I know that I lean towards lisp, but I cannot articulate why lisp usage fits my mental model more readily than smalltalk/ruby does. Is the gulf between Lisp- and Smalltalk-inspired languages that meaningful?
Before embarking on my programming career, I went through HtDP while I still had time to do stuff like that. So I got a bit of grounding in Scheme. Regardless, when I discovered Ruby, I jumped on it and to this day I prefer to use it over any flavor of Lisp. In the end, I really think it comes down to syntax. I much prefer a normal, imperative kind of workflow. You lose a little bit of power and flexibility over Lisp but the friendliness of having verbs, nouns and diverse semantics wins out over what feels like a monotonous landscape. As you say, the underlying language semantics are largely similar, expressivity is just very similar. So the only thing left is syntax, and when you talk about syntax, you're talking about the most aesthetic part of the language, the part that's hardest to describe and reason about.
But for me the most important has always been to enjoy myself as much as possible. That's also how I can do my best every day. If that means having a 10% lower salary or half the number of job postings I'm fine with it.
If I really needed to find a non Ruby job I'm sure I still could, there's enough demand in general.