> little do they know Ruby is a slower language than Go

Isn't it generally expected for a feature-packed interpreted language to be slower than a minimal compiled language?

But who cares really? I am not using Ruby for HPC. I use it for prototyping, oneliners for ETL and to glue different moving parts in a system or network together. That's it. Its not doing the heavy lifting anyways.

what matters here though is, if it is slower than bash. and that's very unlikely.

when ruby was trendy the 1.9 branch was still cooking so in a lot of people's mind it is veery slow

Heavy lifting Python libraries are in C and C++

The speed argument never convinced me in general, in that whether it is perl, ruby or python, they are all slower than C. So the comparisons really are odd to me.

The "scripting" languages should of course not try to be slow, but people rarely use them for speed-reasons; they use these languages for gains in productivity and ease of writing code, adding features and so forth. That should be the primary focus point.

In the future we may no longer have such a speed penalty anyway.

People think slugs are slow animals... But slugs these days are faster than snails.