A quick look at the programming language shootout (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/) puts Ruby in roughly the same performa

A quick look at the programming language shootout (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/) puts Ruby in roughly the same performance league as Python and Perl, and you'd be hard-put to argue that these aren't popular languages.