[griffordson]

Because they prefer Ruby? I personally wouldn't choose PHP or Perl unless I had no other choice. Nothing wrong with other people choosing them, but they aren't for me. And given the choice between Python and Ruby, I'll choose Ruby unless there is a compelling reason not to. And saving a few hundred dollars on a commodity server would never be compelling enough for me.

Edit: And when I actually need better performance from a specific piece of code, I can and do drop down to C.