Decline and fall of scripting languages ?

[Paul Rubin]

Cliff Wells <cliff at develix.com> writes:
> It didn't say what they left PHP, Perl and Python for (if you are to
> even believe their findings).
> 
> PHP has been losing programmers in droves... to Ruby on Rails, but I'm
> not sure how that is bad news for scripting-language fans.

That's the second time in one or two days that I've heard Ruby on
Rails mentioned.  Can anyone here post a paragraph or two description?
I sort of know what Ruby is, a very OOP-ified Perl-resemblant
language, that's also implemented only as an interpreter.  I can't see
punting Python for it.

Lately I'm interested in OCAML as a possible step up from Python.  It
has bogosity of its own (much of it syntactic) but it has static
typing and a serious compiler, from what I understand.  I don't think
I can grok it from just reading the online tutorial; I'm going to have
to code something in it, once I get a block of time available.  Any
thoughts?