You go inside to pay for gas? I just use the cardswipe/pinpad on the gas pump, which I thought was pretty standard practice these days.

Perhaps that's because they didn't suck so much in the first place (with the possible exception of MRI)?

Because everyone chooses a language based on raw execution speed, amirite?

You were comparing relative increases between different implementations of one language before; now you're comparing the fastest implementation of one language to the not-fastest implementations of others. =_=

Even if they look vaguely similar on the surface, all of the languages you've mentioned are quite different internally. Some performance changes that would take too much effort to change, some won't happen for philosophical reasons, and a great deal more are not applicable to anything other than the language they were written for.

Perl... well, it's either dead or incredibly alive, depending on who you ask, but all development seems to be focused on Perl6.

Ruby doesn't have an "official" interpreter. The standard C implementation uses YARV for 1.9, which is considerably better than MRI (which was in 1.8). Rubinius is supposed to be faster, but isn't quite ready yet. Ruby Enterprise Edition seems to be fairly popular, but doesn't have 1.9 compatability yet. I believe JRuby is fairly widely-used, and it seems that it can perform better than YARV sometimes (and consistently better than MRI).

On the Python front, Unladen Swallow seems to be chugging along, although I'm not sure what we'll get out of it. PyPy is quite promising, and is faster than CPython in many benchmarks.

And pretty much everyone except Apple is planning on supporting WebM (or is, currently). Sure, IE will only support it if a vp8 codec is installed on the machine, but that counts enough for me.

It was my impression that Google created Chrome primarily to push browser speeds (in particular, javascript) forward. Mozilla wouldn't be nearly so concerned with it now if it weren't for V8.

... or one of the many non-Ruby tools.

You misunderstood what I was saying - unit tests should be testing functionality, rather than error handling on every possible type of input, etc. My phrasing was rather misleading, so I'll take the blame for that one.

I should also make the point that dynamically-typed languages do not necessarily allow variables to be used without declaration. `var foo` would be a perfectly acceptable statement (and is, I believe, how C# handles implicitly-typed variables), but none of the (popular) dynamically-typed languages of today have such a thing.

Well, supposedly they're cool right now. I just mentally s/Java/Ruby\/Python/ and s/.NET/Java/ when I watched that video, and it made much more sense.

Well, first off, Droid is a phone produced by Motorola, while Android is the platform that runs on it. Secondly, Android is an operating system, not a programming language; Dalvik is probably the term you wanted to use, but even that's not truly accurate, as it is a virtual machine. I'm not sure what Google refers to the primary language running on Dalvik as, but iirc they call it Java.

My apologies for being pedantic, but this is Slashdot.

That depends on whether you define "better" as "more accurate" or "will get more clicks".

I guess you'll have to satisfy yourself with COBOL ON COGS in the meantime.

Of course, if you're using Java, it's likely you'll also use XML, to make your application more "enterprisey".

While dynamic-typing weenies like myself see no need for schema validations, many classmates of mine seem to think it's a much better idea than receiving a data structure that may or may not be what you want. It's a difference in philosophy.

While I agree with much of your comment, I believe there are reasons for the continued use of scripting languages in web dev, other than ignorance or stupidity.

The web moves fast, and scripting languages, with their lack of compile-run cycle allow quicker development. Things change enough that this is often worth the corresponding drop in execution speed.

Secondly, the widely-used statically-typed languages (Java, C#) are about as non-DRY as you can get, Java in particular. While static typing does not necessitate needless boilerplate, the languages that remove it are only now starting to gain acceptance, and haven't gotten a firm hold on the market (or strong communities) yet.

Thirdly, shared web hosts (where the majority of small businesses and personal sites are hosted) often don't support much other than static files and PHP, possibly ASP (.NET or otherwise, I haven't checked in a while). I've recently switched to doing a lot more static sites generated by Jekyll, simply because GitHub will host it for me for free (and only having to push my git commits to deploy is nice, too). Hosting matters.

Finally, I find that community is far more important than the language itself, and the innovating part of the web community is a fickle beast, but tends to stay in the realm of dynamically-typed languages. It takes a few years to get something roughly as nice as Rails (well... other people like it) or Django, and years are decades in our field. Things like HAML have been ported to .NET and Java, but the development's done in Ruby.