> Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?
I mean I haven’t touched Ruby in years but if you’ve got tokens to burn, who cares? Compute is pretty cheap these days and Ruby is usually fast enough for web stuff, and as far as I can tell 2nd hand the robots write it just fine.
And I say this as someone building a strongly typed programming language that compiles to native code.
Maybe not the most popular answer, but... because JIT?