So, lets talk about JRuby. JRuby is a Ruby implementation on the JVM, and its really awesome power is actually that you can wrap and interface with Java libraries, and still write all of your app code in Ruby.
If Topaz was able to give me the ability to access NLTK, but still write in Ruby? I'd be overjoyed.
> If Topaz was able to give me the ability to access NLTK
I doubt that's going to happen. Topaz is not a Ruby running on the CPython interpreter, the Topaz VM is developed in RPython. As far as I know, RPython doesn't provide that capability either (between VMs coded in RPython), which fijal seems to confirm.
So that would be a very cool project to merge python <-> ruby (or any other interpreter written in RPython). It requires quite a bit of work to pull it off the ground though. I would be happy to provide guidance on that, but I definitely won't do it myself (just yet).
It's also worth noting that this is (mostly) possibly with RubyPython running in Ruby against a CPython2 dynamic library.
Zach Raines did 99% of the heavy lifting (I've got a very small part to the whole project, and no time to work on it right now), and it works pretty nicely overall.
If Topaz was able to give me the ability to access NLTK, but still write in Ruby? I'd be overjoyed.