I love Ruby so much as a scripting language, I ask myself why I don't just use it as an "acceptable lisp" [1] for my research, rather than Haskell. Haskell is more easily parallelized than any other language I've experienced. Alas, my experiments with Ruby 3.1 parallel extensions flunked. Who cares about single core speed?

I was always put off by Rust syntax (it's a fly-pollinated flower, to attract C programmers), but I'm starting to get the genius in its machine model. Learning Rust forces one to understand what's happening at the machine level, but offers better control as a reward. Its expressiveness is a lot closer to Ruby than I had imagined, it won't put me back in the C99 stone ages. So my provisional answer is that Rust is a Faster Ruby.

[1] http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-accepta...