Evan Phoenix is saying it for even longer, and created rubinius as a means to prove it :) (it has since been abandoned, but Chris's truffleruby ported rubinius core and stdlib implementations, so it's great that they've all been feeding each other for quite a while)

Oh yes. It is unfortunate even when something is "right" or "correct" it doesn't means the world will move in that direction.

Hopefully now Shopify has enough resources to push this through.