[irahul]

> Ruby also has the reputation of being much slower than Python, and speed is crucial in the scientific community when it comes to handling data-sets in the range of terabytes.

If we are talking computation speed, the difference between Ruby and Python is a floating point error.

> There is also no adaption of NoSQL or any other of the "modern" data-storage solutions.

NoSQL solutions are "modern", but that doesn't equate to being better. I am more than familiar with almost all major NoSQL players(redis, mongo, couchdb, cassandra etc), and for 99% of the cases, RDBMS is better solution. There is no adoption in scientific community(or most communities) because there isn't a clear benefit. I neither try to use RDBMS as a key-value store, nor do I twist my relational models to fit into a NoSQL offering(mongo makes the translation easier, but lacks things I need).