Discussion with a Java switcher

I can understand where they are coming from, but the problem with speed has never convinced me too much to be honest.

Don't get me wrong: I believe Ruby has still a lot of room for optimisations, and it's nice to see developers putting effort to push it a bit on that front.

But eventually you'll always be able to complain that Ruby is not blazing fast. If you do need that so much, maybe a different language would be better: Scala maybe, or C/C++ or Java. (can't speak for Clojure and the others).

A good programmer needs a good set of tools. Matz (Ruby's creator) tried to make Ruby as nice to code in as possible, and personally it's great for that. I keep going back to Ruby whenever I need to write glue code for my main number crunching stuff (which is in Fortran normally).

I think that's Ruby's niche to be honest. RoR was a fortuitous event, but if the Ruby community would one day put speed before convenience, that will be the day Ruby's raison d'etre would be lost. As for the RoR community I think RoR open the eyes to a lot of people, but if you are a web programmer, and you need speed so badly, there's now (or so I hear) similar frameworks on other systems. Why not use Lift (for Scala) for example?

tl;dr

Guy with ten year experience switched from Java to Ruby two years ago. Issues with Rails' threads and performance. ActiveRecord doesn't do what he needs. Adoption of node.js has highlighted issues with Ruby libs that block and folk are jumping ship. Better to fix Ruby libs.

Odd to me, but there's no mention of JRuby in the discussion.

> ... The focus is on making development easier, faster and more enjoyable. However to get there, they have to somewhat sacrifice some performance.

Tell that to Clojure people.