This is a bad faith argument, the parent is not saying to use C, but surely you can concede that there are better languages for performance and are useful for web development? Even Node is faster than Python and it's chugging along well in the web dev community.

Node is probably faster than Python but so what? It comes with its own set of problems and drawbacks. If you're optimising for performance I don't see why you would go for Node anyway, and if you're not optimising for performance than I still don't see why Node but to each his own :)

Practically every popular language is faster than Ruby and Python.

Ah yes, because C is the only fast language.

C++ is faster (due to inlining and templates).

C++ as it is written can be arbitrarily slower and may have hidden bottlenecks due to copy constructors and poorly thought out Stl usage. But C++ fanboys refuse to admit this.

*can be faster

It can also be slower :)

So can Java :)

web assembly ;)