>>108
Perhaps I'm being presumptuous, but it sounds like the C code you've written only used libc. In that case, I'd agree with you. C's standard library is terrible. Use glib if you're going to use C. You'll then see that things aren't so bad.
>>109
Memory and speed do matter. Why do you think Torvalds wrote git? Why do you think Google wrote Chrome and V8? By improving the performance of these utilities, it literally changed the way they work.
It's true that performance isn't everything. It's engineering. Sometimes you make trade-offs. But if I'm trading away performance, I want to get something in return. What I don't get is why Rubyists are so willing to trade away so much performance and get so little in return.
Look at the D programming language. It offers a lot of the high level features that Python/Ruby have but with the performance of C. D is still under development and the libraries aren't 100% there just yet, but it's definitely a language to watch. D does things the right way.