The title of this post is amusing. Only "less memory leaks"? None would be nicer. (Also "fast" is relative. When you're known for one of the slowest interpreters getting large performance increases is easy. It would be better to bench against something that really is fast, like the JVM for example.)
Python & Ruby are both slower interpreted languages than PHP, for all their lovely syntax.
The JVM is slower to develop for, and when probably 50% of projects on the web are stuff that's built in less than 2 months, using the JVM adds too much complexity where it really isn't needed.
If you want speed (almost) as good as the JVM without using an interpreted language, use Node. Unless of course you only know the one language from your CompSci days..
Compare it with a micro-cached Varnish or nginx .. caching is outside of the "speed" parameters. Of course, you could take a look memcached if you want :)
I can't find the reference I remember but it fits roughly with the link posted (the scale seems to match the max times rather the average times). The differences were tiny but the order was PHP, Python, Ruby if I remember correctly (PHP was in front, PR may have been switched).
In the case of Mako at least, caching doesn't mean caching in the way you mean it. It's more akin to opcode caching in PHP, saving the actual python code generated from the template, not the result. Just saves from reparsing the template every time it's rendered, but the actual template logic still runs.
I like JRuby a lot, in fact it's my favourite scripting language on the CLI, but while it's fast to run its damn slow to compile (remember it still has to compile to JVM bytecodes).
Regardless of whether HN has too many 37Signals posts, this is a valid point. HN is worth a thousand uniques an hour and startups would do well to study the success of 37Signals in writing popular content. I say this as someone who finds 37Signals very off putting!
This. He reads like a 14 year old boy who's been jilted by his first girlfriend. Do grown mean really need a website for "working through my sadness about opportunities lost" when they change primary programming language?
He's such a source of drama; the Scala community is better off without him.
