Name: 
Railing against Ruby
Somewhat inevitably, given the level of hype it has generated, the Ruby “backlash” appears to be gathering momentum (no doubt prompted in part by some inflammatory blog postings in recent days).
Bryan Taylor has written a critique of Ruby (and Rails) and suggests that perhaps it’s about to have its lunch eaten by Erlang. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions, but it’s worth a read. I’m not sure that Ruby (or Rails) killed Perl. As distasteful as you and I may find it, Perl programmers love their language. I don’t think anything will kill Perl. It was undead before Ruby and it’s still undead now. If Rails should have killed anything it would be PHP. Maybe it still will, but PHP is firmly entrenched at the low end thanks to ubiquitous cheap hosting deals and an easy path from pure HTML authoring to server-side development.
Being a novice with both Ruby and Rails, I reserve the right to declare Ruby the One True Language at some point in the future but, for now, I’m still firmly in the static-typing camp.
One thing that I do find mildly amusing about this whole debate is the argument that Java should be used in preference to Ruby because of its superior performance. Isn’t that what the C++ people were saying in 1995?