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> As a Ruby developer, I'm hoping to see a new language created that is inspired by Ruby but is optimized for speed.

You don't need a new language - all you need is a better runtime. See what PyPy does for Python. A good JIT also goes a long way - people forget how terrible Java performance was in the late 90's.

> SSDs really are going to change the game.

I have heard this and I agree with the other posters here who are skeptical on this core point.

For read performance you cache databases in RAM.

For write performance you have writes to log structured storage system.

And either way if you care about your data, you replicate it to multiple datacenters and kill performance.

I'd recommend you checkout mirah (ruby inspired but compiles to jvm bytecode).