I'm hardly Rome-free. America is the Rome of the world, technology is the Rome of America's economy. Programming is the Rome of technology. Ruby is the Rome of programming. (that last one is debatable)
The two most famous rails sites, twitter and groupon, currently use scala and node respectively. I guess that last part is quite debatable.
Python, golang, and Java(+jvm languagages such as scala/clojure) all have a TON of users at very large and interesting firms. I was just reading today about the new york times open sourcing their golang microservice framework.
The essential elements of a Rome-like ecosystem are willingness to innovate, the ecosystem exerting a pulling force on the surroundings drawing resources inexorably towards it due to ideas built structurally into the empire, and the aforementioned myopia and self-obsession stemming from pride. Power and innovation.
I think that programming can be further subdivided into web development and everything else, and then Rails as a platform compared to other frameworks.
Rome had its own evolution, and so each individual Rome is also in a different part of its evolution. When Rome fell, it did so not because of any real weakness on the part of the Romans, but because they'd succeeded in exporting what made them powerful to the surrounding lands. Rome couldn't maintain dominance faced with its provinces each wanting self-rule.
So I consider Rails in the last throes of empire. Its legions will still fuck you up, but it can't fight the whole world anymore. Still the best web dev framework out there, every other framework ends up reimplementing Rails, but it can't be all things to all people anymore.
