Ruby, Python, "Power"

A mostly good article that shows little regard for reality in the performance section. "Ruby and CPython perform roughly the same." That is correct if you believe that 3x slower is roughly the same (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=...). They are in the same ballpark (vs. Java or C).

If the author had left it at that, fine. He goes on: "It would be surprising if [YARV, the new Ruby VM meant to improve performance] didn't perform better than CPython." That would make sense if CPython and Ruby performed the same, but Ruby is a third as fast as CPython. In order to match CPython, Ruby has a long way to go. Ruby 1.9, using that YARV VM, still lags behind Python (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...). Throw in Psyco (an optimized Python JIT compiler) and Ruby 1.9 looks a good 3-4x slower.

Python is faster than Ruby in a significant way (3x is significant). Ruby is a great language that I really like. You don't have to stretch its performance characteristics to make a case for the language - especially when raw performance often isn't important at all.