I worked at a place that shall remain anonymous. An engineer later terminated for cause spent almost 2 months setting up a hadoop cluster with all the stuff that goes along with it to analyze some log data. When a senior engineer manager finally got incredibly tired of waiting for the results, said senior engineer manager wrote the desired analysis in an afternoon in ruby, and it ran in a couple hours mostly limited by the spindle speed on his laptop drive.

The productivity factor of ruby or python in a single memory space vs hadoop is at least 10x.