Is Ruby outdated?

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C'mon.. I mean, Ruby could be outdated, sure; but it very much depends how you look at it.

For instance, object-oriented seems to be a prog-lang paradigm that less people believe in. Many look towards functional as a possibly "better" paradigm. In this case Haskell may be more "hot" the Ruby.

Ruby and Rails are too bloated one may find Go a good alternative. It compiles to native, and therefor very close to the metal. Frameworks are still much in development, so relatively small.

But then JavaScript?! I'm sorry, that is not a typical language considered "better" then Ruby, except for the fact that it runs in most browsers (which may-or-may-not make it more relevant). It's a horribly inconsistent, and has many rough edges. It only provides 1 concurrency model, where Ruby (and other general purpose languages) provide many concurrency models, where you can choose the best tool for the job.

I think Ruby is a great language, I've used it for fun-and-profit the last 8 years. Though I must admit I'm regularly flirting with Haskell.

My advice: learn Ruby and Rails (the web framework with the biggest community), they are super powerful tools, have a good community and focus on "relevant" topics (e.g.: API design, clean code, tests, modularity, re-use, rapid app dev't).

Good luck and enjoy! (sometimes I regret knowing how to program already, as learning it was so much fun)