I hear the weeaboos across the world now screaming “what about Ruby!”, but Ruby just proves the point. A Mormon Japanese dude (read: English literate, world-focused, non-Otaku, non-loner mindset) coupled with an excellent framework that gained fame world-wide (Rails). It’s nice that there are great Japanese Rubyists but they are not responsible for the popularity of the language.
Yes, Ruby (programming language) was, but Rails (a force-multiplying framework) wasn't. Also, anyone can correct me if I'm wrong, but my observation was that Rails adoption was not nearly as strong among Japanese Rubyist as it was in other places.
One interesting phenomenon is the how Ruby and Rails are mostly in parallel worlds. It can't just be a language barrier. There are lots of initiatives like JRuby and Rubinius that are more or less ignored by the Ruby Core team.
With all the Ruby enthusiasts outside of Japan, it seems unnatural that most of the core commiters are still Japanese.
Yes, that's correct. Ruby is much more widely known that Rails, although I have the feeling that is changing.
A few years ago Cookpad (http://cookpad.com/), a Japanese recipe site with millions of users, switched to Rails. That may be contributing to a change in awareness locally.
Yes Cookpad is really involved in promoting Rails use in Japan - and they should be. Their user base boasts 1 in every 2 20-30y.o. women in Japan. Astounding metric.
