Look at e.g. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t... and flip through the various benchmarks

That kind of shows my point. (Although not as well as some of the others.)

On that particular benchmark Perl is faster than the fastest JRuby, and Python benchmarks. And faster than 11 other benchmarks, but the secondary perl benchmark program is the slowest of the bunch...

It's a log scale though, so it doesn't capture the magnitude of how much slower it is. When your argument is that you're 100x instead of 103x slower than C, that's not very convincing.

Not if it matters much, but I have no problem with the argument that some things should be written in C or on top of the JVM for performance reasons.

My problem is with people claiming that some popular scripting language, say Ruby, is massively faster than all the rest. Which as a general rule is simply not true (although it may be the cases, for some well defined set of problems).

When flipping through them, note that Perl is consistently faster than other dynamic languages when dealing with text while also being very concise in code (generally a sign for code that can be written quickly).