In the past 2 years I've adopted Ruby for 99% of my coding needs. My experience sounds different to yours: I started with plain C when PCs were so slow you ne

In the past 2 years I've adopted Ruby for 99% of my coding needs. My experience sounds different to yours: I started with plain C when PCs were so slow you needed a compiled language. When I moved from C to C++ in order to better write Windows applications, it was nice to have classes, constructors/destructors to make memory management easier, but the other stuff (eg. templating system and supplied hash/array/string classes) caused pain and I avoided it. I was excited about Java. It seemed like a cleaner language for ex-C programmers to move to OO, but then I got really irritated when trying to actually use it for developing real applications, for all the reasons you mentioned. I kept searching, dabbled with functional programming in Haskell, and happily used Perl for a long while until finally discovering Ruby. To me, Ruby was like a Perl that really was more enjoyable to use. By that I mean I really value a system that quickly lets me express my thoughts and lets me get applications up and running faster. Often, well-written Ruby looks like pseudocode. In my case, subconsciously the enjoyment factor of the language really was a stumbling block that slowed down my progress on my projects. There have been no downsides. CPUs haven't stopped getting faster since my first steps in ASM/C 15 years ago, so I have no Ruby performance problem. Architectural changes that Ruby enables make it fun to write performant code.