I would say Ruby is slow because not much effort has been spent in making the interpreter faster. Same applies to Python. Smalltalk is just as dynamic as Ruby or Python but performs better by a magnitude, see http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org. Since Smalltalk was more or less replaced by Java and C# (that is at least 10 years ago) no more performance optimization work had been done for it and Smalltalk is still ways faster than Ruby and Python. The people at Xerox Parc and at OTI/IBM had the money to pay the people that work on making Smalltalk faster. What I don't understand is why Google doesn't spend the money for making Python faster as they are a big Python shop. Instead they spend money on development of languages like Go...
