Ruby's poor at portability, but that's a solvable problem. For everything else, Ruby's got advantages. It really can't be beat regarding safety. Performance can

Ruby's poor at portability, but that's a solvable problem. For everything else, Ruby's got advantages. It really can't be beat regarding safety. Performance can be fixed with native extensions, which ironically are a large source of the portability problems. It's not as good at concurrency as say, Erlang, but it's got the primitives you need and they are first-class parts of the language. Number crunching is just an application and Ruby excels at application building. Just don't ask for a native interface, lol. Shoes is great and all, but it's just a baby.