RUBY

What does /prog/ think about Ruby?
I've been doing a lot of reading on the language, and I find it very verbose, the code is very literal.
I'm particularly interested in the Rails aspect, as webdev is quite a hobby of mine.

Ruby is the most object-oriented of the common languages, since literally everything is an object, there are no primitives. You can do some pretty nifty things with it, like monkey-patching, metaprogramming, etc., since it's interpreted and heavily dynamic. However, it's also slow... very, VERY slow. (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php) They say "just write speed-critical code in C," but that's a cop-out; why should I use it when other languages can run with decent speed without resorting to writing it in C?