Sorry, but do you have any justification for this? It sounds like you've never written anything substantial in ruby or you're being intentionally inflammatory. I consider my programming career to be very much in its infancy (have only been coding for 4 years, and only as my sole occupation for the last 2), but I constantly strive to produce efficient, elegant code and to expand my understanding of various computer science topics and the tools that I need to do my job. I have experience in C, assembly, Lisp, python, ruby, haskell, prolog and a variety of other languages, and I have found extremely compelling elements to all of them. Ruby happens to have a fairly beautify object-oriented structure and it sprinkles in a ton of nice functional elements that I've come to appreciate given my exposure to lisp and haskell. I work with it every day and I find it quite nice to work with (I spend a lot of time doing metaprogramming-related stuff, working to create plugins to modularize a lot of our companies core application functionality).

Also I cannot speak to other companies using ruby or doing other web-related work, but none of my co-workers have ever exhibited any trace of hostility toward women. Sadly there are no female programmers in our development group, but I can assure you that women would be a welcome addition. So while I may not completely disagree that web-related businesses may be worse in this regard, your post is riddled with offensive generalizations about a community that you clearly know little about.

My condolences to you and your family. Sorry for your loss and that you're having to deal with stuff like this right now. Best of luck sorting everything out.

But I am curious about about the machines that are responsible for a lot of attacks online. A year or so ago I noticed ssh brute force attempts in /var/log/secure and found a cool solution called denyhosts that parses log files, adjusts /etc/hosts.deny, and logs all activity. This got me thinking about a project... I would really like to create some NSE (nmap scripting engine) scripts, or something similar, to go through and scan the machines that show up in my log files as trying to weasel their way in via ssh or other common, filtered tools. It would be interesting to create some visual representations of services, geographical locations, and general makeup of the boxes that are attacking these services.