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.
Well, partly. The argument re scripting language + C is that mostly, the run time is in a small part of the code. Measure to find that part (NYTProf etc for Perl), then rewrite it in C. (I.e. inner loops, not reading config files.) The inefficiency of scripting languages is then irrelevant for many use cases which don't even involve databases.
My experiences of using Lisp compilers is very much out of date, I never saw any Lisp jobs I wanted after university.
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-...