I can understand where they are coming from, but the problem with speed has never convinced me too much to be honest.<p>Don't get me wrong: I believe Ruby has still a lot of room for optimisations, and it's nice to see developers putting effort to push it a bit on that front.<p>But eventually you'll always be able to complain that Ruby is not blazing fast. If you do need that so much, maybe a different language would be better: Scala maybe, or C/C++ or Java. (can't speak for Clojure and the others).<p>A good programmer needs a good set of tools. Matz (Ruby's creator) tried to make Ruby as nice to code in as possible, and personally it's great for that. I keep going back to Ruby whenever I need to write glue code for my main number crunching stuff (which is in Fortran normally).<p>I think that's Ruby's niche to be honest. RoR was a fortuitous event, but if the Ruby community would one day put speed before convenience, that will be the day Ruby's raison d'etre would be lost. As for the RoR community I think RoR open the eyes to a lot of people, but if you are a web programmer, and you need speed so badly, there's now (or so I hear) similar frameworks on other systems. Why not use Lift (for Scala) for example?