That was really really annoying and pointless. Why has this been up voted?
I wonder why HN users feel so entitled to getting only the articles they find interesting. I haven't seen this point in Terms & Conditions, have I missed it?
Ruby. That's usually enough. Don't you know that no startup is a proper startup without using Ruby and then rewriting everything once they hit the magical 10 user limit (extreme scaling)? It's agile, you know.
I got into Ruby years ago, and I still think it's a lot of fun to write code in it. Sometimes I just need a break from C++ copy constructors and debugging -O3 optimized core files. Anyway, it's interesting to hear what influenced Matz in creating the language.
Since you don't seem to like the machine performance of Ruby (understandable), what do you prefer? Do you find that runtime speed is an issue for your application? What are you application(s)?