I've stopped commenting about MRI entirely, it just makes people mad, and it's not even fun anymore. It's too easy. Still, I have to give Matz credit for making a language a lot of people sincerely love.
I know it's splitting hairs whether bytecode + a VM counts as compiled or interpreted (it's both, really), but compiling to bytecode rather than a pure interpreter usually makes enough of a difference performance-wise that it's worth giving some credit.
If people would just stop talking about Ruby 1.8, it wold allow for more meaningful discussion. 1.9 is a lot faster and has better support for concurrency.
I know, but often when people make that distinction, it's concerned with what performance ballpark the language has rather than strictly implementation issues.
I know it's splitting hairs whether bytecode + a VM counts as compiled or interpreted (it's both, really), but compiling to bytecode rather than a pure interpreter usually makes enough of a difference performance-wise that it's worth giving some credit.