I think a lot of the problems with Ruby are really problems with the nature of Rails jobs over the past 5 years. Lots of juniors (which is great) in a field where people change jobs every year or two (which is okay, but horrible from a codebase standpoint). Giant monorails applications grow strata of different generations of code/teams/opinions; and each new generation of engineer on the project adds their own stamp on top. It leads to situations where you have enormous applications that are so deeply entagled within themselves that it becomes nearly impossible to refactor out poor performing bits of the app.

It reminds me of the Kowloon Walled City[1] -- originally a (likely cleanly built) fort that took on more and more people until it became a morass of people and buildings with no consistency or strong structural concerns.

Then Rails (and Ruby) get this reputation for being a Kowloon rather than the Fort.

Not that ruby is not slow compared to other languages, but it's not as slow as perceived.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City)