This is nonsense. Ruby's MRI interpreter can be beaten by an unusually wide margin because it is unusually slow for an interpreter of a language like Ruby. Go look at the benchmarks on <a href="http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/" rel="nofollow">http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/</a> -- on many benchmarks, fast implementations of similar dynamic languages like Python, Scheme, and (tellingly) Smalltalk beat Ruby's MRI by ~10x.
So, I've read this a couple of times now, and I honestly can't see this as being anything other than someone being intentionally contrarian.<p>As far as I can tell, this guy was not at the presentation, and is basing his opinions on snippets that he's read elsewhere on the net. Additionally, as far as I can tell, this guy hasn't produced anything of merit to the programming community.<p>I'm not a rails apologist, and have never actually done anything in Ruby, but to me this guy comes off as a gas bag who thinks he knows better than everyone else; all based on hearsay.
As mentioned elsewhere: Naïvité. It's a terrific loan-word, it has a diaeresis and an accent :-)<p><a href="http://tinyurl.com/2hep8v" rel="nofollow">http://tinyurl.com/2hep8v</a>