[kragen]

Ruby 1.9 is a big improvement over Ruby 1.8, but last I heard, a lot of people still had to use 1.8. In six months maybe "Ruby is slow" will no longer be a valid argument for PHP over Ruby, but if you're using Ruby 1.8, it's still valid.

PHP, and I say this as someone who thinks it's awesome, isn't so much a language as a way to glue together a bunch of C libraries, so its speed isn't that important.

[Andys]

One of the reasons Ruby 1.9 adoption is so slow is that the people who really needed speed have long since moved on. 1.8 is still good enough for most of us who use Rails every day.