PHP and PYTHON are slow too. Like them Ruby can take advantage ) of C extensions. You cant write everything in ruby like PHP developpers use native drivers for database communication , compression , image manipulation ,etc ... that's normal.
Scripted languages should be used for what they are for , a thin layer on the top of other more performant languages.
Like Twitter , Ruby/Rails allowed them to bootstrap their idea ,"probe" a market, make it work , then they thought about performance and scaling. That's what scripted languages are for.
Yes, but I think what ksec was driving at is there isn't an intrinsic reason what you said should be true.
Why should Ruby (and scripting languages) be used for RAD and not performance? That's because implementations range from really slow to somewhat slow. Self, LuaJIT, V8 and IonMonkey, and increasingly PyPy are ample evidence that this need not be the case, and that's just listing the dynamically-typed languages.
The bar has been raised the past few years. Increasingly we can pick three of: productivity, libraries, performance. Ruby lacks the last, which makes it a less interesting prospect for future greenfield projects compared to its competition.
The problem was PHP and Python are slow too, and yet they are still faster then Ruby. And not to mention there are many other implementation of the two that gets them further along. So if Ruby was 1x, and PHP / Python are 1.5x, there are things that can get the last two to 3 - 4x. While Ruby is still just there, 1x. ( Numbers are for explanation only ). I really wish more resources were pour into Rubinius.
Scripted languages should be used for what they are for , a thin layer on the top of other more performant languages.
Like Twitter , Ruby/Rails allowed them to bootstrap their idea ,"probe" a market, make it work , then they thought about performance and scaling. That's what scripted languages are for.