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"Ruby has. . .the blazing speed and low overhead of Lisp."

How did you conclude this?

With a smirk, most likely.

Granted the OP was being facetious in claiming the beauty of Perl or blazing speed of Lisp, but he was sincere in analogizing Ruby to Perl and Lisp. In that sense, he was wrong. Ruby is nowhere near the speed of Lisp. Peter Norvig claims Lisp is "about 1 to 2 times slower than C++" (http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html), and I don't think anyone would sensibly equate the speeds of Ruby and Lisp.

Well on a related note, when you become really comfortable with ruby, it's incredibly fast to write scripts and one-liners to do really complex stuff. Especially with the ruby shell as help.

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