> Python -- never mind Ruby

Lol, with the new JIT compilers and TruffleRuby, Ruby is blowing Python out of the water performance-wise. TruffleRuby approaching Nodejs speed for some tasks.

But yes, CL is fast. Faster than any other dynamic language, approaching Java speed (and Java is shockingly quick considering it has a GC).

It's always cool when we can achieve a speed up in something, but I fear that we may have reached the point of Ruby becoming mostly irrelevant to the larger market. Python, thanks mainly to it's data science libraries, has taken it's place as the go to non-JavaScript scripting language. Unless Ruby comes up with some killer feature like it had with Ruby-on-Rails back in the day, I doubt that the speed up of Ruby will be what revives it for most people.

All of that said, I would love for Ruby to usurp Python from it's thrown!

I mean, no one uses either for its speed. But just funny how reputations linger.

Python did a good job offsetting speed issues by rewriting key parts of libraries in C (or maybe C++/fortran in some spots). I don't know if the same effort ever went into key Ruby libraries.

> Faster than any other dynamic language, approaching Java speed

Almost as fast as Java, that's pretty speedy! It's not LuaJIT fast but it ain't half bad!

Lua is also a dynamic language, but who's counting?

The decline of Lush [0] as a popular data-science language saddens me.

One could use it as a dynamically typed interactive language with nice support for nd array manipulation, excellent support for calling C functions. Once satisfied with correctness of the implementation one could then compile it down to a statically typed C for speed. It ran circles around byte compiled Python in speed. Two of Python's relative advantages in the data-science domain were (i) nicer array manipulation syntax and (ii) one could build the non data-sciency part of the application in Python as well thus avoiding a proliferation of tooling and languages necessary.

Regarding Ruby, even TCL was faster than non JITed Ruby. That was funny because TCL used to be considered the slowest possible runtime (among professionally used runtimes)

[0] http://lush.sourceforge.net/

There are some other active Lisp efforts in the data science space, such as cl-ana.[1]

[1] https://github.com/ghollisjr/cl-ana