"Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves."
Matz 2003
I have to agree with the dead comment here. Focusing just on people is how we got to the stage of having extremely fast CPUs that can compute billions if not trillions of operations and yet websites and apps lag. We can run full fledged games at 240 FPS and yet, websites and apps lag. It truly is heresy to not fully utilize the hardware we create, such a waste, simply because people don't optimize at every step of the process, useless abstraction on top of useless abstraction. In game engines they do, to some extent, because they have to, and so should they in general purpose applications as well.
Apps and sites are pushed out fast, crammed with the everything including the kitchen sink and monetised to the hilt. This is more the reason why they suck these days, rather than because programmers are modelling abstractions from the human end rather than the machine end.
And yet Ruby has a global interpreter lock and is an interpreted language. Ruby, I assume as a language, has had all the time in the world to develop well. Why don't we fully utilize our hardware while still allowing for high usability such as with Rust with algebraic data types or (if you don't want to deal with a borrow checker) recent C++ with auto pointers, or Haskell which is garbage collected but is still quite fast and of course highly expressive?
IMHO the answer is that Rust, C++ and Haskell are out there and anybody can use them to build a web site. Maybe the real question is why there are developers the prefer coding in Ruby. In my case, I barely used C++ in the mid 90s and only read some examples of Rust and Haskell. I can't really tell anything about Haskell. Rust and C++ look too hard to use, I don't want to care anymore about all that micromanagement stuff. I'm really with Matz on this. I'm not with him on making types more prominent in Ruby. They are also micromanagement and I don't plan to use those new features. There are plenty of languages with that kind of typing, there is no need to have another one.
Actually I'm doing most of my money with Elixir and Python now. Elixir is nice except for deployment, like all the compiled languages I know. Python is much like Ruby but with weird design choices. Oh well, I guess that people coming from Python could say that the weird one is Ruby.
Ironically I find the lack of static typing in Elixir (and thus Erlang) its greatest weakness.
Dynamic typing only gets you so far. Once you get beyond a certain scale of your project (number of lines, files, modules etc.) then static typing a sanity saver.
I still love Elixir to death but the lack of static typing isn't making it favours.