Ruby has massive adoption, as do Python and Perl and PHP. Environments with objectively better performance like the JVM and .NET have not, in fact, done all that well comparatively in this environment (which is to say they've done fine too and achieved "massive" adoption, just not that much better than their slower competitors).
In fact, looking at the market as it stands right now I'd say that performance concerns are almost entirely uncorrelated with programming environment adoption.
Considering the massive speed improvements we have been seeing in Javascript, but also languages like Ruby, I'd say compilers is a solved problem for staticly compiled languages, but perhaps not as much for interpreted highly expressive languages.
Sort of. Lisp had a good combo of expressiveness and speed in the 80s, but it reached that point on the efficiency frontier by different techniques, like heavier use of macros. The newer techniques like trace compilation can make life even better, but the language design decisions in Ruby/Python/etc. that made that sort of thing necessary if you want speed, they didn't really pay for themselves from the perspective of smug Lisp weenies like me who were happy enough with our language and just wanted pragmatics like libraries.
LOL! It is expressive though. It's got really powerful first-class functions. It's got classes. It's got prototypes. It's got generators. It's got other things that I don't even remember (but will probably have to learn, to implement them, make them fast, and then fix the bugs).
I actually think that the reason why JS is so odd is that it is so expressive. That tends to happen with kitchen sink languages like C++.
Relevant: "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
Of course - a low level guy. It is quite likely that he is either not exposed at all to any expressive languages or reject them out of ideological reasons (JikesRVM is quite a strong symptom of the latter case).
I have no idea what the Jikes RVM has to do with "ideology". The point is that you're trying to tell someone who has a significant academic and industrial PL pedigree that they don't know what an expressive language is.
You seem to have an intense dislike of JavaScript. I'll the first one to admit that JavaScript has a lot of problems. But not being expressive enough is not one of them. JS is, if anything, too dynamic and expressive.
Yes, if he thinks that JS is expressive he does not know what is expressive. And his track record clearly lacks anything related to any expressive language. I can only explain it with an ideology, because ignorance is not an option here.
And, no, JS is not expressive. It got strict limits on an available level of abstraction (unless you go into eval, of course).
In fact, looking at the market as it stands right now I'd say that performance concerns are almost entirely uncorrelated with programming environment adoption.