https://github.com/darius/superbench is not a big fancy cross-language shootout, at all, but I tried a few little programs I actually cared about. LuaJIT 'won' in the sense that of the languages I tried it had the best combo of performance and pleasant productivity, informally. I didn't try to quantify the latter.
(Also, no Java because I wouldn't seriously consider it for hacking-for-fun.)
(Also, no Java because I wouldn't seriously consider it for hacking-for-fun.)