The only programming I'm doing at the exact moment are little hacking projects. But I did a whole bunch of backend "cloud" programming in 2006-2008, and I used Ruby for most of it. This included 90% of the backend for Flektor.com (now deceased -- but successful in that it was cool and we sold it to Fox) and all the backend stuff for Monkey Gods (monkeygods.com). At Flektor I actually started the backend in Lisp. At first ACL. Then they wanted thousands per server -- haha. Then we ported to CMUCL. But there were no libraries, and those we had were buggy. Even the MySql integration was buggy. The last thing you want is a flakey database library.

We switched to Ruby. Sure ActiveRecord was buggy too, but in a totally different way. The bugs didn't crash it, or put weird data into the tables -- they merely generated sloppy or incorrect queries (this was 2006). I could spot these and work around. And there were libraries for a LOT of stuff. Fixing bugs in the libraries was easy too.

Ruby also seems to have been designed as a practical language. There is a bit of distain in the Lisp world (or used to be) for I/O, as if it's dirty. Look at Scheme, it doesn't even have I/O in the spec (or didn't last time I looked). I/O is inherently a side effect, which to the functional thinker is BAD! Well I have news. Writing real programs is all about I/O.