All I see is a guy who set up a naive test app in Sinatra (served by WEBrick for all we know) and found that it served fewer requests per second than a test app he wrote in PHP. Then, where most people would have tried to find the slowdown, he just skipped all that and decided that "apparently" Ruby is slow and "probably there is some lame reason why this happens." On the basis of one application with one particular set of libraries that he didn't even benchmark.
Like, if I run a C++ program off a 2X CD-RW drive in a computer with a Motorola 68000 and it's slower than my Ruby site is on my 8-core Mac Pro with an SSD, do I get to write a rant about how slow C++ is?
I can guarantee it. I was thinking of an actual computer I had, and the read speed of the drive alone was slower than the time it takes Mongrel to serve up a page with Rails.
Like, if I run a C++ program off a 2X CD-RW drive in a computer with a Motorola 68000 and it's slower than my Ruby site is on my 8-core Mac Pro with an SSD, do I get to write a rant about how slow C++ is?