[the_gastropod]

Nobody is pretending Ruby is the fastest interpreter. Who are you arguing against? Rubyists generally consider Ruby “fast enough”. Which it is, for many applications.

For every engineer insisting Ruby is fast enough in a situation where it is not, there are 1000s in environments where Ruby absolutely is more than sufficient, insisting it’s too slow.

[tomlin]

It doesn't answer the question of why you would choose Ruby. Honestly, you all sound like you got a Sega Genesis for Christmas, while everyone else got a SNES. You can tell other kids on the playground that Genesis has better graphics, but the spec sheets don't lie.

You're trying to make it seem like it's a wash, because "scripted" but it's not. Node.js outperforms Ruby in every department. And it's based on one of the slowest scripting languages of all time. Ruby is a dead language in many countries.

In Canada, you would have to travel the country to find a Ruby job. And if you don't think in American-centric terms, that is meaningful.

[the_gastropod]

Fine analogy. Plenty of people liked the Sega Genesis more than the SNES. (I think a more apt analogy is more contemporary consoles, where the lowly-spec’d Nintendo competes just fine against the competition’s higher performance units. People like Nintendo for reasons other than the spec sheet.)

I enjoy writing Ruby a heck of a lot more than I do writing JavaScript. I like the object model. I like Ruby’s standard library. I like the Ruby community. I like the tooling: irb is fantastic. Bundler is still one of the best package managers around—makes npm and yarn look silly by comparison.

The spec sheet just does not matter for virtually any of my work. Switching to a less enjoyable, more performant, language might make a 60ms response time average become 55ms. Who cares? That performance difference was even bigger 15 years ago, and it didn’t matter then. It matters less today.

GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Netflix (yes! Even Netflix!), Soundcloud, Kickstarter, etc. etc. all use Ruby today. It is a fantastic development environment when you’re more concerned with doing your job, and less concerned with performance pissing contests.

[tomlin]

I'm a Nintendo die hard fan boy, I don't care about speed. I learned how to "code" in ColdFusion. I am all for the underdog POV.

We're talking about performance because of the context, which is – there aren't the jobs to support the language's continued growth and dedication. We're talking about speed because there needs to be a defining reason to continue using a language and develop in an ecosystem that isn't moving at the growth of other communities.

If Nintendo Switch had 4 games, and they all looked like dog piss - asking why would I bother wasting time with Switch is a valid opinion.

There's also this insect-minded logic of only being a "front end developer" or "back end developer", and that mindset is furthered by languages that don't bother speaking the language of the web. If I learn javascript, I can be both - pretty much on day 1. If I learn Ruby and Javascript, great. How easy is that to do for a junior developer just getting out of school? Not widely.