Rick Nooner has dumped a bunch of thoughts on using Ruby in his distributed software and he makes a great point about the common garbage collecting and processor speed concerns:

While writing video games, I witnessed the transition from assembly language to C. In the nuclear industry, I saw the transition from special purpose, real time operating systems to VMS, QNX and Unix and from assembly and fortran to C then C++. Each transistion raised the same questions about performance, etc that you are asking now about garbage collected languages.

We still need to address the concerns. But, yeah, I think this transition is led by people who believe that expressive and pliable technology has the edge. Pressure in the business world which fuels innovation and demands expression.

I wonder, though, is there pressure from users to find a way of expressing their needs for personal innovation? (From Ara Howard on ruby-talk.)