After having waved goodbye to windoz platforms a couple of years ago, I was faced with lots of VB programs mainly because of M$'s policy of steering you into that direction with its COM, SQLServer and MSOffice stuff.
Although I have in the past done and taught a lot of C/C++ in UNIX prior to a windoz migration imposed by job requirements, I must say that VB has been more than adequate speed wise for my work.
In migrating from windoz to linux, I decided to go Python. Nobody was going to convince me in going back to C++/C where it is not needed, given the unbelievable elegance of Python leading to much shortened development times (for those who did their homework first).
As to execution speed, I run mostly on a 2.8GHz P4 and Python has been more than adequate for my needs. I transposed and very much expanded a rather sophisticated charting system using Python with Qt/PyQt which performs quite a bit faster than the old VB based version.
I can only see an execution speed problem arise in Python in algorithmic processing and this only with people not conversant with the wealth of libraries available in Python to take care of the problem. In fact, Python being very popular in leading research labs for scientific calculation, one can find a ready Python package for almost any of the leading math and stat tools.
As to Ruby, I don't know very much about it but I am planning to take a serious look at it as well. At the surface, Ruby and Python share some of the basic philosophies.
Java? I did some things in it but I never understood its advantage as compared to C++. It is practically as cluttered. Of course things like memory mgmt are done better. Speed as compared to Python? Lots has been written about this, pro and con examples abound. If you love Java, 100% exclusively owned by a proprietary outfit in grave trouble, by all means, go Java.
I know better.
nono