[poet]

This rant seems misplaced. Rubinius adopted a test driven approach for testing Ruby compatibility because Ruby doesn't have a spec, merely a reference implementation. The spec is being worked on, but the fact that it doesn't exist has more to do with Matz and Ruby's culture than Rubinius. Further, your other objections also appear to be rooted in a misunderstanding of Ruby's culture. The fact that there are lots of choices in the Ruby's ecosystem is what Ruby is about. Hell, choice is built right into Ruby with its inheritance model. Python is the opposite, and I'm guessing that's what your background is in.

[joe_the_user]

I'm not sure not if software development questions should be solved with a reference to "Ruby's culture". Wouldn't "what works best" be a better criteria?

I've done more Ruby than Python altogether. It's true that I am no longer doing Ruby - mostly because it is too slow for anything beyond a fairly simple web platform (I would welcome an improvement in Ruby performance).

I would argue that the time spent on the tests could instead be spent on an actual spec.

[poet]

Did you stop programming in Ruby before 1.9.1? Most common performance issues were fixed in that release. If you need something faster than 1.9.1, you probably should be dropping down to C anyway.

[joe_the_user]

C++ for the desktop actually...

The thing is; C# and Java are also fast enough for an adequate desktop GUI. But they're horrible to program in.

Ruby and Python are still in about the same category of slowness even with pypy's success. I'm doubtful of Python desktop apps but I know they are out-there.