Perhaps the reason many (like myself) did not immediately expect the speedup is that they started on or are still using another non-scripting programming langua

Perhaps the reason many (like myself) did not immediately expect the speedup is that they started on or are still using another non-scripting programming languages. There, the language parsing penalty is paid during the compile step, and as far as a user is concerned the object approach is obviously faster than parsing from JSON. This does leave me wandering - is the result here applicable to other scripting languages too? The argument in the article would seem to apply in the general case, but perhaps other languages have some particularities that change the result.