The "enterprise" I work at uses a dozen little RoR apps to put a quick and dirty UI on some DB tables so analysts/sales/support folks can interact with the data.
The main problem with Ruby in this kind of setting is that these internal tools are extremely hard to maintain because of backwards compatibility issues--which there are plenty due to lack of spec, organic language development etc. The effort to upgrade the Ruby version is much greater than doing incremental hacks to support some half-day feature, so the codebase stays pinned to the 2007 Ruby release, we can't use new gems, have to live with old bugs or missing features, etc. And with every new incremental change the project gets harder to upgrade.
The Java ecosystem has done a lot better in this regard. Scala is not very good either, we have had a couple Scala projects with version lock-in effect as well.
The main problem with Ruby in this kind of setting is that these internal tools are extremely hard to maintain because of backwards compatibility issues--which there are plenty due to lack of spec, organic language development etc. The effort to upgrade the Ruby version is much greater than doing incremental hacks to support some half-day feature, so the codebase stays pinned to the 2007 Ruby release, we can't use new gems, have to live with old bugs or missing features, etc. And with every new incremental change the project gets harder to upgrade.
The Java ecosystem has done a lot better in this regard. Scala is not very good either, we have had a couple Scala projects with version lock-in effect as well.