Oh, please don't think I am hating on Ruby and implying another language. It's pretty much the only language I use these days.
I've been using it outside of a web-based context to do some more computational intensive work and just get a little bummed when I need to re-implement something in C to get the performance I need. (I'm not a C hater either! I've just come to love Ruby.)
No worries, I wasn't thinking that :-) There's a lot of uncertainty around Ruby's performance and functionality based on people's experiences with 1.8 that no longer holds true in 1.9 (or when using implementations like JRuby). I'm just doing my little bit to put fires out before they occur ;-)
I've been using it outside of a web-based context to do some more computational intensive work and just get a little bummed when I need to re-implement something in C to get the performance I need. (I'm not a C hater either! I've just come to love Ruby.)