when ruby was trendy the 1.9 branch was still cooking so in a lot of people's mind it is veery slow

The speed argument never convinced me in general, in that whether it is perl, ruby or python, they are all slower than C. So the comparisons really are odd to me.

The "scripting" languages should of course not try to be slow, but people rarely use them for speed-reasons; they use these languages for gains in productivity and ease of writing code, adding features and so forth. That should be the primary focus point.

In the future we may no longer have such a speed penalty anyway.