But I might argue a little about the point made. Even if Ruby acquired a large community over the time, Python still has a much bigger one. Google and other companies are putting a lot of efforts in making it more and more efficient. I believe that it is still on par, if not better than Ruby. And you also forget to mention another scripting language : Javascript. It is common to put it in the “interpreted language” category. It would be very wrong.

You all know that browsers are fighting over Javascript performances. This allowed Javascript to make a huge comeback. And when I say huge, I really mean it. Three years ago, it was even slower than PHP, really it was poor. Now, it is not only byte compiled, it goes even further than that. It is just in time compiled when this makes sense. It uses inferences too. There is a lot of optimizations in Javascript that makes it even able to compete with C in some cases !

It might be a somewhat crude language at first look. If you go deep in Javascript, you might find it is a lot more subtle than you thought. And it is really powerfull. Probably as much as Ruby is, probably even more. And it is definitely more efficient than Python or Ruby for the time being.

So, I might suggest people to think about the huge win it represents for web development. One language for server and client side. When you write your code to check your last form, you can make it so it will validate the form both on the client before sumbitting and on the server side after that. Sure, you’ll need some sort of header function to collect the data that will be different on both sides, but you get my point.

Better, there already are HTTP servers out there that allows you to write your Javascript server and client side code in a single file, allowing you to choose where your code should be processed depending on the function (server-side or clint-side) without even having to worry how the data will be sent from one to another. each of those function call will only be replaced on each side to ensure the data is sent over the network at the appropriate time and processed as it should be. you can do so using, depending on your need, both a synchronized call or asynchronized call allowing you to fine tune your performances on the client side.

Well, I’m not telling you Javascript is ready to become the next answer for everything, but I’m definitely telling that it’s bad to forget it in such an article!

Be sure to read my forthcoming articles about distribution using Ruby, and an easy way to use C++ inside Ruby