This really hit home for us when we started messing with TweetRex. It was my first project in Ruby and things seemed to go well -- the language has nice syntax

This really hit home for us when we started messing with TweetRex. It was my first project in Ruby and things seemed to go well -- the language has nice syntax, good selection of libraries, the prototype was done fairly quickly... ...and then I had to rewrite 80% of it in C++ because of the horrible threading, slow string manipulation and high memory usage. It was still an interesting experiment, and I intend to continue to use Ruby for stuff where performance doesn't really matter, but I was surprised to learn so vividly that the Ruby bashing that I'd assumed was oversold was in fact pretty much spot on.