> Dart's VM idea was dropped so its small usage is largely compiling to JS still.

Are you sure about this? I was under the impression that today's Flutter development is highly dependent on the niceties the Dart VM provides, and newer Dart releases improved upon them.

In terms of language design, it seems like swift and julia are the most forward looking.

I personally don't think swift will ever escape the Mac ecosystem, just like Objective-C never did, but something with the same DNA will.

In the same way that Objective-C and Ruby both implement the philosophy of Smalltalk, I think that philosophy has yet to be fleshed out in a simple syntax that is natively jit'ed/compiled.

The same goes for julia as an answer to R/pandas.

Those are both typically faster than Ruby, tho. Ruby (especially pre-1.9) probably does represent the mainstream peak for tolerance of slowness.

> I would say that the overall idea of performance being traded for programmer time is definitely happening despite the emergence of Rust.

In some sense Rust is in that same vain - reducing certain errors and the need for tools like Coverity, which in turn makes programmers more efficient.

JS and Python are not to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, though.