I forgot one thing - the Rails framework (and ruby itself) is really gaining steam right now, so it'd probably be good to give it a good shot, even if you don't like it or it's slow, Ruby books this year alone shot up 1552% in sales. Chances are, if the Ruby 2.0 release comes with a decent speed increase, we can probably expect to see Ruby (and rails as well) become quite a bit more popular than it is right now (it's happening already judging on how high the book sales have gone.) You can ignore ruby entirely for development of all kinds if you want, and that's fine. I'm suggesting you give it a shot for web, because it has become quite good at that.
As for speed - which is obviously the big issue here -, well, I never focus on speed when looking at a programming language, mainly because when you think about it there's almost no such thing as a fast language really. It all depends on the parser or how well the compiler can optimize your workings, because some languages have quite a bit more overhead than others (take for example, VB, it's a pretty high level language, the compiler for it has an awful lot of overhead to go through before it outputs the executable, which isn't guaranteed to be of super mega high quality, Delphi is just as simple and powerful of a language, but the compiler is quite fast and quite powerful producing high quality executables.) Even the lowest level languages can seem slow depending on the circumstances of your environment (you can't just say 'Program X written in C will work very very fast and get done in about 10 minutes' because it depends on your environment and what's running, too many variables to factor in.) Although it is quite noticable, Ruby is very slow compared to other languages, maybe if Ruby supports C built extentions now or sometime in the near future (never looked into it) someone can build an equivilant of the Python Psyco module ;>
Plus I like to focus more on what I need or should use (i.e. language) rather than what I might prefer to work with. Sometimes C might be better to work with, sometimes Python, sometimes Perl, sometimes Java, maybe Delphi, you get my point.
Clearly, I am outmatched and must listen to you, the greatest arbiter in the known galaxy.Originally Posted by prog-bman
