Help me validate these points regarding Ruby

Question

Hi,

I have started learning Ruby for the past 2,3 weeks and I have come up with some findings on the language. Can someone please validate these points.

1. Implemented in many other high level languages such as C, Java, .Net etc.,
2. Is slow for the obvious reason that it cannot beat any of the already known high level languages.
3. Should never be compared with any other high level language.
4. Not suitable for large applications.
5. Completely open source and is in a budding state.
6. Has a framework called Rails which claims that it would be good for Agile development
7. Community out there is getting better day by day and finding help immediately should not be a problem as time goes by.
8. Has significant changes between releases which many developers wont welcome right away.
9. Running time cannot be comprehensively estimated since the language has several underlying implementation in several languages.
10. Books are always outdated by the time when you finish them.

Thanks.

Answer 1

1. true - JRuby being my favourite
2. false - you haven't actually stated an obvious reason, performance varies wildly between implementations and I can assure you - there a lot of "high level" languages slower than Ruby(mind that the language is never slow - it's execution environment/VM is slow)
3. false - many people compare it all the time to Java, Python, Smalltalk, Lisp, Perl - there is nothing bad about that
4. false - twitter was originally implemented in Ruby
5. true
6. true - has many other great web frameworks, too, like Sinatra
7. true
8. true - the changes between releases are generally big indeed, but this is normal for a relatively young community driven project and it is not a bad thing
9. true - there a lot of benchmarks lying around in the Internet - here's a recent one
10. most of the time - Programming Ruby 1.9 and The Ruby Programming Language are still not outdated. Books about Rails however tend to quickly get outdated.

Answer 2

Is slow for the obvious reason that it cannot beat any of the already known high level languages.

How do you know it cannot "beat" any of the already known high level languages?

Running time cannot be comprehensively estimated since the language has several underlying implementation in several languages.

How is that any different from C, C++, Java, Python, ...?

Can the running time of a particular Ruby implementation be estimated?