Java is slow (run time interpreted), and a security risk. I no longer install it on my system.

Don't know anything about Ruby, although I've heard of it in passing.

If I were to ditch XB, it would be for C/C++, if only because it is widely supported and most 'real world' software is written in it. But there's reasons I did not do that years ago when I was looking to get past QuickBasic, and ended up with XB.

There's nothing I've tried to do in XB that it couldn't handle. If it wasn't built in, I was able to write the code. If there was a C library, I could use it. If there was a bug in XB itself, the source is written in XB so I could debug it myself.

All the really advanced stuff, for example OpenGL, would be done much the same way in other languages as they are in XB, so it's a wash.

Granted, XB has not been continually updated "officially", and there is room for improvement. But it still works despite being "officially" more than a decade old.

Another thought, have you ever wondered why there are literally hundreds if not thousands of programming languages out there? No one language can do all things equally well. You pick the language for the task. One wouldn't use FORTRAN or COBOL to write a first person shooter game, would they?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages

Brian