Comment by mikebenfield

I've always been fascinated by this phenomenon, which one can also see in the Lua and Python communities: Use a language whose natural implementation is extremely slow, and then invest enormous amounts of time and effort to make it fast. Why not just use a language whose natural implementation is already pretty fast? While I understand the value of some dynamic language features, many of the features of dynamic languages that are hardest to make fast are undesirable in any code base larger than a 50 line script anyway.