[AF]

You can directly compare the speed of an application or a language.

It is not subjective to say 'C is faster than Perl' or 'Perl is faster than Ruby'. That is true, in almost every instance, C IS faster than the equivalent Perl code and the equivalent Perl code is faster than Ruby (whether that holds true for Ruby 1.9 we shall see).

On the other hand, what constitutes a 'strong' implementation of OO is purely subjective. Would you consider Common Lisp's implementation of OO 'strong'? It is completely different than how Ruby works. But it isn't any more or less OO, it is a different way of doing it. Now if we really want to get into subjectiveness, Smalltalkers would probably say that Ruby's OO is not 'strong' because Ruby resorts to not making conditionals actual objects, unlike Smalltalk, in which literally just about everything is an object.

You might even say that Python is more OO than Ruby because functions are objects in Python but methods are not similar first-class constructs in Ruby (note: I wouldn't actually argue this, but it is just an example of how the languages do something differently).

[chaostheory]

I still feel your 1st post was weak, but you make good points in this post - u win; i'm not keen on religious flame wars