I see this as a devtime-runtime tradeoff, If you follow the link to the mentioned article [1] there is some discussion about how to improve on this tradeoff.

FWIW: I use C for many of my personal projects as I often enjoy solving problems at that level, however at my job I am 90% Perl with the other 10% being various web things (css, js, html, etc.).

I too would be very interested in articles looking at performance of some of the older dynamic languages.

[1] https://speakerdeck.com/alex/why-python-ruby-and-javascript-...