[charlesju]

What are some other benefits of C or Java over something like Ruby and Python?

[scott_s]

The level of abstraction matches most hardware.

Not all code written in C is performance-critical. But sometimes it's still the best choice if your code is directly talking to hardware.

[jshen]

In that case wouldn't you write some components in C and glue it all together with something like ruby?

[scott_s]

Sure, that sounds reasonable. But you've still chosen C to talk to the hardware.

[jshen]

If you're using ruby or python you're ultimately using C anyway, right ;)