I work on JRuby because I love Ruby and I honestly believe JRuby is one of the best things ever to happen to Ruby. JRuby takes a decade of Java dogma and turns it on its head. JRuby isn't about Java, it's about taking the best of the Java platform and using it to improve Ruby. It's about me and others working relentlessly, writing Java so you don't have to. It's about giving Ruby access to one of the best VMs around, to one of the largest collections of libraries in the world, to a pool of talented engineers who've written this stuff a dozen times over. Sure there's crap in the Java world. Sure the Java elite took power in the late 90s and started to jam a bunch of nonsense down our throats. Sure the language has aged a bit. That's all peripheral. JRuby makes it possible to filter out and take advantage of the good parts of the Java world without writing a single line of Java.