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Ruby is slow. Fast, good, easy - pick 2.

A false dilemma.

Explain with examples?

What technical limitation prevents a language from being fast, easy to use, and well designed? Alex seems to argue that Scala is 'fast, good, and easy', and I would tend to concur.

What I've seen of C# 3.0 and F# also implies that those languages could meet this criteria, but my experience with them is limited.

Software engineering is about tradeoffs. I'll take that a step further: everything is about tradeoffs. You can always optimise for one use case to the exclusion of the others.

Are you saying that fortran isn't faster than scala/jvm based languages? That APL isn't better for matrice's? That lisp macros aren't more powerful? Or that php isn't simpler than scala?

Being good at all three may be possible, but being optimal at all three is probably impossible.

"Being good at all three may be possible, but being optimal at all three is probably impossible."

Why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimization_(mathematics)#Mult...

"Multi-objective optimization (or programming),[1][2] also known as multi-criteria or multi-attribute optimization, is the process of simultaneously optimizing two or more conflicting objectives subject to certain constraints."

Note "conflicting objectives". Why do you believe the objectives are conflicting?

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