I also got into Ruby before Rails (although only by a period of a few months so I was still a Ruby newbie when Rails first started making news). I also have experience the "Ruby can do XYZ" with my responding "didn't everybody know that". I also enjoyed the discussion on ruby-talk for a long while. But as Ruby continues to get more popular the volume on the mailing list got so high that I couldn't keep up with it. The content is good but the volume is just too much to keep up with. Seems to be a common problem on the best newgroups. Wish there was a way to combat that volume in a sensible way.
