Granted, you did put "cutting edge" in quotes, but it's still worth stating explicitly, Go isn't cutting edge, and neither are Ruby, Node.js, NoSQL, or most of the other technological rehashes ignorant developers get excited over.
These people would never pay any attention to old, boring technology like Lisp or Smalltalk or even (given the success of NoSQL) ACID-compliant relational databases like PostgreSQL. But repackage some of the good ideas from them and pass them off as your own, fire up your hype machine, and these clueless devs will eat it up.
Why, look at the cult-like following Matz enjoys for creating a half-baked Smalltalk and Perl knock-off.
90% of the value created by using Ruby is because of the exemplary tools put out there by the people IN that cult-like following.
There's a lot of programming languages and programmers totally focussed on application performance as well as squeezing the limits out of their hardware. The ruby community is focussed on developer performance and squeezing the limits out of their people.
If more languages and communities spent as much time on streamlining everything around time to market, Ruby would not be nearly as big as it is. Because most are not focussed on that, Ruby stands out significantly when it comes to getting big things done with fewer people.
That's why so many start ups use it. That's also why so many start ups eventually come back and refactor the slower parts of their system with something like Go...but the important thing is that they got to market, built enough of a customer base and revenue stream that they can both a) afford to refactor and b) need to refactor because so many people are using it.
Building a language and tools around people rather than process is a unique undertaking. Because of that Ruby and Matz deserve every ounce of credit that they get. Doesn't have to be right for everything, but what they try to do well they do exceptionally well.
These people would never pay any attention to old, boring technology like Lisp or Smalltalk or even (given the success of NoSQL) ACID-compliant relational databases like PostgreSQL. But repackage some of the good ideas from them and pass them off as your own, fire up your hype machine, and these clueless devs will eat it up.
Why, look at the cult-like following Matz enjoys for creating a half-baked Smalltalk and Perl knock-off.