"I always thought Smalltalk would beat Java. I just didn't know it would be called 'Ruby' when it did so." - Kent Beck There's a decent demand for Ruby develop

"I always thought Smalltalk would beat Java. I just didn't know it would be called 'Ruby' when it did so." - Kent Beck There's a decent demand for Ruby developers worldwide. I worked in New Zealand before getting paid relocation to Germany as a Ruby dev and I'm still getting daily "come to London" LinkedIn spam for Ruby work. "Developer happiness" is how Matz describes minimising friction between the developer and the language. Ruby aims to provide abstractions with the lowest possible cognitive overhead. Contrast this with Rust which aims to provide abstractions with the lowest possible performance overhead. Everything is a trade-off. Ruby's stagnation has nothing to do with the community. Improving Ruby performance is extremely difficult because of the sheer flexibility of the language. It doesn't help that until fairly recently no one got paid to work on Ruby. Now Heroku are paying several of the core team. The IBM OMR project is working on bringing a companion JIT to standard Ruby. Oracle are working on a ground up re-implementation of Ruby using a new technology called Truffle + Graal for implementing languages on top of the JVM with performance which will be on par with Go.