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Python is much faster than MRI Ruby used to be back in the day

So you might imagine what ruby felt like ...

It's just an opinion, but in exchange for the speed hit you get a huge decent standard library, and lots of high quality libraries that you can stitch together much more easily than in C.

In the vast majority of my use cases, I'll take the half second load hit in exchange for that (if it's even that long).

Yeah, it's totally dependent on what you're doing. It would be insane to write a simple script in C, and it would be insane to write an operating system in Python. Most code lies somewhere between those two extremes.

I fully admit that the cult of performance is silly - and anyway, it can sometimes be easier to write performant code in a slightly more high-level language that you're extremely adept at writing. For instance, I'd wager most people could write a more performant web server in Go than they could in C, even if they could write a web server in C.