i think DHH's opinion is fair. without profiling, one really doesn't know what the hell is happening. and by being "slower", i just don't know what the comparis

i think DHH's opinion is fair. without profiling, one really doesn't know what the hell is happening. and by being "slower", i just don't know what the comparison point is. sure, ruby is slower as a language - but for the complete application stack you'd need to compare the performance of django or cake to rails _for the same_ or relatively similar apps. only then, meaningful numbers will emerge regarding where the real difficulty lies.