Beyond striking.
A Java developer, an expert in some of the Java web app frameworks, recently 
rewrote an existing Java web app in Ruby using the Rails framework. Not only was the Ruby rewrite significantly less code, but it ran faster. He called the LOC difference “beyond striking”. He also discusses his results sanely, mentioning caveats when appropriate.
Meanwhile, Ruby is getting a virtual machine
implementation, so the Java performance shortfall mentioned in the
above article is about to get worse. Some Ruby community reaction is ridiculous.
The Python world has been doing its own soul searching inspired by the Rails framework.
Slashdotted,
so you've probably all seen it, but interesting. If you haven't seen
the Slashdot article, all the links (and more!) are in this post, so no
need to go slumming. [Ceejbot]